The pervasive aroma of fresh, hot food would have smelled good to her, if she could have ignored the equally inescapable smell of sweat and sewer gas that rose up from the sweltering pavement around her. Marissa Erinson wanted nothing more than to escape from the pressing crowd that had arisen, somewhat spontaneously, from the old fairgrounds in St. Louis.

True, she had once fantasized about the crowds and the sights and the excitement, having heard from her infancy about the World's Fair of 1904. Grandma Cora had spent hours describing the unparalleled grandeur of the neo-Classical buildings, paper buildings which had deteriorated within a couple of years. According to Grandma, she had never tasted food like the fair's: ice cream in a cone made like a waffle, Dr. Pepper soda, and tea poured over ice. "That tea tasted like heaven," Grandma claimed, wiping her forehead as if she could still feel the 90-degree heat beating down on her.

As Marissa had later learned, weeks after she had left her newly air-condition home in rural South Carolina, St. Louis didn't hold the market on magic, and reality couldn't match up to her idealistic imaginings of adventurous happenings and interesting people. Only two things lived up to her expectations of splendor: the music that drifted through the air of the park and the beautiful white building that stretched over a hundred feet in the air. In South Carolina, she had not encountered any music that danced like the music of St. Louis. It bobbed and jagged like a hummingbird over a river, and though it swept Marissa along in its stream, she couldn't catch it.

As for the building, it stood taller than any man-made structure she had seen up close, and while the hemlock trees at home had stood perhaps a bit taller, they had bent to the will of the wind, thin and spindle and tensile. The white stone edifice of the building stretched so wide that she couldn't see the sides from the front, and it seemed as immovable as it was immense.

"Marissa," a familiar voice called out, and Marissa ripped herself from her reverie. "Come over here. You're a smartie. Maybe you can give us a hand."

Sam Lincoln, Marissa complained internally.

Irritated and a bit anxious, she pretended not to see him. The first few times that Sam had spoken to Marissa, she had felt incredibly flattered that someone with such high social standing would even talk to her. False flattery, she later recognized. After a few days of exposure to Sam's dubious charms, Marissa had realized something, and she kicked herself for not seeing the truth earlier.

Sam held everything that could recommend him to the unthinking masses: good looks, money, family name. The only thing Sam didn't have, in Marissa's opinion, was any measure of true character. Oh, she would have called him a "character," she knew, but his greatest strength came from his ability to show off for his friends, not from any substance. All performance. To this fact Marissa owed her greatest embarrassment to date.

She remembered staring up at a cloud that had passed overhead, obscuring the sun and acting as harbinger to a late summer cool front. Within her first few hours in the city, her boss's wife had warned Marissa not to expect the pleasant weather to last. According to the Farmer's Almanac, Mrs. Ellenwood had assured Marissa, the city of St. Louis would see a late Indian Summer, a sweltering reminiscent of Marissa's South Carolina hometown. At least, Mrs. Ellenwood had insisted that the two locations would prove comparable.

Of course, Mrs. Ellenwood had never really traveled beyond the confines of her neighborhood and would therefore possess no knowledge of the great difference. A hot day in the city in fact could not really compare to a hot day near Marissa's country home west of New Town, South Carolina. Even though her mother's Great-grand-daddy Withers had move from the beach after the hurricane of 1822, he had settled near a large lake which provided Marissa, a fifth-generation Erinson, with plenty of cool recreation in the hot summer months. And on particularly sweltering days, the family would pack up with Miss Lottie, a neighboring Negro woman who lived in a small house on the Erinson property. Miss Lottie would bring her five children in the Erinson's second wagon and the whole group would caravan to the beach over an hour away. If the clouds had completely evaporated, Mr. Erinson would join the group and turn the expedition into an overnight camping trip.

Marissa loved camping with Miss Lottie's kids. The woman's eldest daughter, Moira, seemed a fiery counterpoint to Marissa's indulgent nature, and Moira, along with Miss Lottie, seemed the only creatures on the planet not overwhelmed by Marissa's brother. Marissa's younger brother, Jackson, overshadowed everyone, whether adult or child, rich or poor, educated or ignorant. On some occasions, this served Marissa well. She enjoyed grabbing the attention of the various pew occupants as she strode by Jackson's side into the little chapel in New Town. Too, Jackson managed to wrench costly items from willing fingers on a regular basis. On many occasions, he brought home sugar sticks that he had received from the store proprietor's wife, Mrs. Andersson. "That Erinson boy," the woman would say with a slightly chastising tone. Then an indulgent smile would soften her stare when she actually turned his way. Marissa had always secretly equated his smooth talk and flashy smile with tools of thievery. Still, his "victims" had found more pleasure in indulging him than pain in parting with their treasures.

For Marissa, though, she spent most of her time with her brother protecting herself from his persistence. For every charming trait that he possessed, he held methods of tormenting and coercing Marissa into all sorts of unpleasant situations. She loved him, but she honestly couldn't regret a few months away from him. Looking around her, she laughed at the realization that all the years of fending off her brother's energies had probably emboldened her to undertake the crazy excursion hundreds of miles from her home. Usually, Marissa felt timid on her bravest day, but what possible challenges could compete with fending off her brother?

Marissa could never have known how prescient her thoughts would prove. If she had held any illusion that life on her own would be easy, her first week disabused her of her naiveté. On her third day in town, she had, she thought, mastered the delivery bike that her boss had instructed her to learn. This feat, for a woman, had to amount to a great accomplishment. Everyone knew that women couldn't think the right way to maneuver through traffic – her boss had informed her of the fact as soon as she had arrived. At her insistence, however, the boss finally agreed to give Marissa a trial run, and Marissa had managed with great success. Actually, she had never ridden a bicycle before, but her boss didn't need to know that. It can't be that much harder than riding a horse, she reasoned. By her first afternoon, she had managed to stop running up over curbs or falling over when she dodged a car or buggy. She hadn't lost or sullied a single book, and on day three, she felt secure enough in her ability to believe that she had achieved mastery of the vehicle.

When Marissa had convinced her mother to convince her daddy to let her leave the comfort of their renovated plantation – one previously abandoned and derelict since the Civil War - so she could go to work for a university bookstore, Marissa had considered herself the most amazing woman in the world. Not only would she have access to all of the university's class material through the bookstore, she would have an income and a place to stay. An unchaperoned woman in a college town. Marissa sighed at the memory.

Within mere days, reality slapped her across the face and sent her, crawling, back to her small apartment above the bookstore at Forsyth and Asbury. Really, the job should not have required any great effort on her part. Her boss, Mr. Ellenwood, had requested that she deliver a set of classroom books to Professor Garner, the professor of Biology whose office rested on the south side of the school. To Marissa, the task presented very little challenge. Surely, if she could maneuver the hills and ditches of the back of her property in the deep south state of Carolina, she could manage paved roads in the Midwest metropolis of Missouri.

Should have presented no challenge, but the coyotes and bears in the backwoods back home couldn't compare to the cold-hearted cads of the big city. On the infamous third day, her first ten minutes of work passed uneventfully, and Marissa almost forgot that her little bike pulled a cart with fifty pounds of books behind her. With only a couple of blocks to go, Marissa had begun to celebrate, and though she realized the dearth of glamour involved in her feat, she couldn't help feeling a sense of accomplishment.

The feeling lasted until twelve minutes into the fifteen-minute bike ride, exactly until the moment that she encountered Sam Lincoln for the first time.

"Miss?" the voice had come from the sidewalk to her right, and at first, Marissa ignored it, assuming that no one had reason to call her. "Hey, lady!" the voice came more demandingly, and a two-toned shoe appeared in front of Marissa's tire. The baggy plus fours appeared even more abruptly, and Marissa swerved violently to avoid injuring the leg and foot inside the apparel. Unfortunately, the movement sent her cargo into a catastrophic lurch, and before she could right herself, the bike plunged to the pavement. Several books lay brutalized beneath her bike, and matching scrapes began to well with blood on her left elbow and knee. When she felt the pain of the scratches, she forced herself not to cry, but once she had extricated herself from the wreckage and viewed the scene of destruction, tears began to sting her eyes despite her resolve.

Her skin, she knew, would heal, but she couldn't salvage all of the books, two ripped nearly in half from the force of the fall. Too, her stockings now sported a large hole that had begun to run, her woolen sweater wore a similar blemish, and her embarrassingly long hair, which she worked hard to hide, had escaped its tight bun when her cloche had flown across the road. Though she had known that all self-respecting young women in the city would have shorn their hair to at least shoulder length, Marissa couldn't leave behind the more provincial fashion of letting her hair fall to the middle of her back. The clothes disaster left her with only one pair of stockings and two sweaters to her name, and though she had hoped to salvage some of her self-respect, she could hear the guffaws and snickers of several people in her general vicinity. Before glancing up to view her audience, she scrambled across to grab her hat and had managed to shove a good deal of her slightly wavy hair under her cap by the time she met anyone's gaze.

Though her mind initially burned with both embarrassment at her dilemma and indignation at the owner of the leg that had caused her accident, her thoughts turned to gratitude when she viewed the owner shushing his companions before turning toward Marissa with a look of concern.

"Are you okay, Miss?" the pleasant voice queried, and Marissa looked up into a pair of jovial green eyes.

"I'll be fine," she tried to sound confident, though tears still threatened to overspill their restraints. Despite her emotional upheaval, she worked hard to take in the appearance of her assailant-rescuer. She could tell little from his sweater-vest or skimmer hat, only that he preferred casual dress on that particular day. His slicked back hair parted neatly on one side, and he looked very clean and well-manicured, more than she could say for herself at the moment.

Judging by his companions, however, he belonged to a family of comfortable means. All of his friends wore a casual, sophisticated air, and Marissa recognized several high-quality items of clothing adorning the young man's friends.

"I don't know who let you out on the street like that," came the surprisingly rude expression from the seemingly compassionate face of the young man. "Are you one of those suffrage people?"

"Suffrage?" the accusation felt so foreign as to confuse the normally astute Marissa.

"You know," the young man continued, slowing his speech as if to make himself clearer to a slower mind. "Women's rights, voting, trying to be a man?"

For several seconds, Marissa tried to process the ridiculous assertion that the young man had leveled her way, aware that she appeared severely lacking in intelligence at the moment. She wavered between smiling dumbly up at him, a move that would no doubt establish her as simple, and reprimanding him for his impudence by exposing his ignorance to his friends. Though Marissa held no great allegiance to the Suffragettes, she certainly knew a significant amount about them, no doubt more than this impudent youth who had sent her flying onto the pavement.

As usual, Marissa chose the less confrontational route. "Uh, erm...no," she stuttered ridiculously. "I just have to make a living somehow. I work at the bookstore."

A titter of laughter erupted from the small crowd of men, and the tears resurfaced in Marissa's eyes. She considered scurrying away as quickly as possible, tail neatly between her legs.

"Shhh!" came the unexpected admonishment, and Marissa again looked up into that young man's strange mixture of mirth and compassion. Did he really care if they stopped, or did he want to prolong his friends' pleasure at her expense? "Don't listen to them. None of them had to work a day in their lives."

"And you did?" Marissa spurted impulsively. She immediately wished the words back. Another round of laughter spread through the group, but this time it seemed directed at the young man. Marissa must have guessed right about his wealth.

After a glare to quiet his "pack," the man turned back to Marissa. "There are all types of work, sweet lady. I have had my share, just not what you would consider 'earning my keep.'"

At his last words, he lifted his chin at two of the nearby young men and like soldiers, they peeled off from the group and headed toward Marissa. She initially cringed away from them, so little experience did she have with young men, but she quickly figured out that the first young man had dispatched the other two merely to retrieve Marissa's books from the street.

"So, you work at the campus bookstore," he observed. "What's your name?"

Marissa hesitated. She felt no great trust for him, completely confused at his motive for engaging her thusly.

"I can just go ask Mr. Ellenwood," he asserted at her silence, this time infusing his jocularity with a teasing threat. "He'll tell me anything I want."

Though he wore a joking demeanor, Marissa couldn't escape the sensation that a more serious intent lay behind the young man's tone, as if he fully intended to find her out one way or another. The attitude would have raised Marissa's ire and secured her rebellion, but she hated confrontation, and the way the young man carried himself, she felt sure that he possessed the power to back up his intimations. Not that she suspected any serious harm from him, just perhaps more mischief than she cared to encounter. She decided to salvage her pride and concede at the same time by making a demand of her own.

"I think it's only proper for me to know your name before I disclose mine," she tried to appear proud, though she knew her insecurity would leak through the tone. She took comfort in the fact that most people didn't possess the insight to notice such things.

At her demand, some hoots and hollers erupted from the man's friends, a sure recognition of her challenge. Undaunted, Marissa just squared her shoulders and looked the young man in the eyes. She felt absolutely no confidence, but she could bluster through it for a few minutes at least.

The man's eyes flashed, and Marissa felt for a moment some genuine malice just simmering under the surface. He eyed her for only an instant, but in that minute, he seemed to assure himself that she posed no real threat to his dominance – perhaps he had noted her insecurity – and so returned the smile to his eyes.

"Sam Lincoln," he conceded, and tilted his head at her expectantly.

"Like Abraham?" she asked stupidly, and again Sam broke into a full grin.

"Like Abraham, but not related. I think you owe me something?" he reminded, not missing a beat.

"Oh, uh...Marissa," she offered, hoping she could maintain some dignity by refusing to divulge her last name.

"Marissa who?" Sam pressed, and Marissa clenched her jaw irritatedly. This brought an even bigger smile to Sam's face. "Mr. Ellenwood," Sam reminded her.

"Oh, no, sorry," she feigned forgetfulness to mask her concession. "Marissa Erinson," she capitulated, and her humiliation felt complete.

"Well, Marissa Erinson," Sam teased, and he stepped a step closer to her, taking her hand and pulling her out of the street and up onto the curb. "If you stand in the street for much longer, you'll end up with hoofprints on your back."

Completely unused to the contact, Marissa cringed away from the young man's touch; she had come to consider him a bit of a cad. She turned back to the street as if to retrieve her things only to find that the two book-retrievers had also righted her bike which now stood erect in the gutter.

Once again, Sam took her hand uninvited and spun her back to face him.

"You should let me look at those cuts," he pressed. "They look pretty nasty."

Marissa had completely forgotten the cuts, but once he reminded her, she felt the throb of the torn skin and the trickle of blood where it seeped down her nylons.

"No!" she insisted too vehemently. "They're nothing. I'll bandage them after I've delivered the books."

Though she felt his resistance, she pressed forward with her escape. "The professors always have the best medicine, and the university is bound to keep bandages on site."

"Professors have whiskey?" one of Sam's friends murmured, and Marissa's jaw dropped despite her desire to appear collected. “Cause whiskey is the best medicine. Guess it’s time to go back to school.”

Prohibition had outlawed whiskey nine years before, but Marissa noted that her new acquaintance seemed comfortable enough with the transgression of those laws.

Shooting a glare behind him, Sam smiled reassuringly up at Marissa as if to allay her concerns. "Always kidding around," he shook his head, then quickly redirected Marissa's attention, effectively wrapping up their encounter at the same time. "Here's twenty dollars to replace the books," he gallantly offered, pressing it into her hand before she could refuse. "Get those bandaged quickly," he nodded at the wound on her knee.

A bit dumbfounded, Marissa stared once again at the young man, not sure how to properly respond and still maintain her self-respect. Taking advantage of her stupor, Sam motioned with his head, and the group moved as a unit down the street, the opposite direction from the university.

"Thanks!" Marissa called out weakly, and Sam turned back to smirk at her over his shoulder.

"Oh, no problem," he insisted. "We'll see you around town."

Completely at a loss, Marissa stood and stared after them for a full minute, grateful that Sam didn't consider her important enough for another glance. What a crazy afternoon! she mused, finally gathering herself enough to remember the waiting professor and her book-laden bike.

She turned and shuffled back to her three-wheeled conveyance, climbing aboard and continuing her original course toward the university. Unable to wipe the preceding minutes from her mind, Marissa decided - as her father always encouraged - to analyze them rationally.

First of all, she had no idea what to make of Sam. True, he had initially caused her crash in the first place, and she had not yet ascertained how that had happened. Could he possibly have stuck his foot out at such an inopportune moment by accident? Marissa couldn't fully dismiss the possibility. His manner and the state of his friends spoke good breeding, but Marissa couldn't shake the sense that Sam Lincoln knew a thing or two about the less-than-dignified side of life. His confidence and smooth comportment made him attractive, maybe even alluring, but Marissa had no great longing for action and adventure, and something in his eyes seemed more dangerous than she ever intended to tolerate.

He had seemed interested in her, though for what reason she couldn't fathom. Perhaps he thought her pretty: she knew she could clean up nicely, though her current state wouldn't place her in that category. Maybe her naiveté amused him. Ironically, she really knew and understood quite a bit about the world; she just couldn't always conduct herself with as much sophistication as she would have liked. Definitely, he had enjoyed the encounter for some reason, but Marissa couldn't divine his motive for amusement, and she didn't possess enough curiosity on the subject to want to seek him out in the future for the answer.

Turning her attention to her own behavior, Marissa found both reasons for censure and reasons for satisfaction. On the down side, she had allowed herself to crash recklessly into a pedestrian's foot. She had also stumbled over her words to such an extent that she still didn't know what Sam or his friends thought of her brain capacity.

On the other hand, Marissa had regained her self-respect when she had won the concession of Sam's name. She had gotten the money back for the books, though through no accomplishment of her own, and she would make it to Professor Garner's having lost only a few minutes. All in all, she had forfeited little more than some pride, and she didn't need that anyway. A little humility never hurt anyone, she reasoned.

By the time she rounded the corner and spotted the professor's office, she felt fairly content with how everything had ended. She would erase Sam Lincoln and his friends from her thoughts and continue with her well-laid plans until circumstance provided some reason for her to rethink her determination.