A Lost Lady
Sweet Water is a division town on the Burlington line, and the house above the marsh is the one place in it where the railroad aristocracy stops; Captain Forrester laid track across the whole West, and his young wife's charm is the town's chief ornament. The boy Niel Herbert, carried into that house after an accident, takes her as the measure of everything gracious, so that the Captain's slow ruin and the tastes his wife cannot give up reach the reader through the shock of a disillusion that is really Niel's own. Willa Cather's shortest major novel, and the one in which the pioneer generation is watched being displaced by men like Ivy Peters, who drains the marsh for wheat.
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