The Lost Prince Read Online Free PDF

train alone to Cincinnati to meet with the president of the company, Homer Smith, with her bank draft for five thousand dollars in hand.
    Eleanor found herself on the long train ride to southern Ohio, content to have this time to herself, solitude having become in no way troubling to her since her time in college. She had been accustomed to riding the train while at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. “Smith women are very familiar with trains,” her roommate from Philadelphia had observed. “We are all escaping from the strictures of some other world.” Her roommate was escaping Main Line Philadelphia. Eleanor believed she fit into that truism, having felt a blessed release every time she traveled “out west,” as her Winsor School classmates called it, at the beginning of each school year, always by train. “Boston women feel comfortable traveling to Europe,” her grandmother Putnam had observed many times, “but we have never been west of Worcester.” Northampton, Massachusetts, the home of Smith College, was west of Worcester and so was New York City, but even Eleanor, as venturesome as she was, in good Bostonian fashion had never traveled west of New York. So now she felt she was headed off to the territory that only a century previous had been the western extremity of the nation. She knew from her experience inVienna and from the journal that California with all its boundless freedom figured significantly in her life, but she knew she was not going to travel there. So Cincinnati was as far out as she was going to go, and she had to admit a certain anxiousness as she passed the long hours alone on the train hurtling westward.
    She had never minded traveling alone, and she paid no heed to people who turned up noses realizing that she was. And of course back home she told no one and no one seemed to notice; she was after all still single and without immediate family.
    On her long train rides she enjoyed being “alone with her thoughts,” as William James called it, and of course she enjoyed reading, often the long involved European novels of Zola or Flaubert or those of Henry James, whom she adored, and always when she was not reading her mind wandered. It was on those long train rides, she told her famous godfather, that she thought her most profound thoughts and, as her roommate from Philadelphia also observed, she found herself “contemplating her place in the universe outside Boston.” Her roommate, a thoroughly practical and commonsense woman, was always amused by hearing what Eleanor had been thinking on her train rides to and from her provincial home. And so on this long train ride to the western extremity of her universe, Eleanor found herself thinking about her life over the past two years and wondering how it all was going to fit together. She was on a mission she did not fully understand, determined to return home having converted the monies gained from her rather miraculous sale of a piece of jewelry into part ownership of a company she knew nothing about. She was doing it all because she knew she had to, and she admitted that the raw feeling in her stomach came from far more than just her heading out into unfamiliar territory. It came from her fear that she did not know what she was doing and that she might fail. She might not end up with what she needed, and then what?
    Eleanor, who always prided herself on being a woman of independent spirit, now found herself acting on instructions she did not understand written in a journal whose literal authenticity she chose to believe in. She found herself asking the question she would ask herself many times over the succeeding years: Was she doing all this as a matter of free will or in order to fulfill some predetermined destiny? Was this a noble mission or simply a fool’s errand, a blind adherence to some fantastic writings of a madman and the deluded dream of meeting again the love of her life?
    She planned to stay the night at a hotel in