Characters:
- Maggie
- Jimmie
- Pete
Summary:
- The novel opens with Jimmie, a young boy, leading a gang fight. Jimmie is rescued by Pete, and they encounter Jimmie's brutal father who brings him home where the reader is introduced to his timid older sister Maggie and little brother Tommie.
- Tommie and the father eventually die and Jimmie hardens into a sneering, aggressive youth. He gets a job as a teamster, but Maggie, by contrast, grows up into a beautiful and hopeful young woman.
- Pete and Maggie begin dating, and Jimmie becomes furious that Pete has "ruined" his sister. Maggie leaves home and goes to live with Pete.
- A few weeks later, Pete meets Nellie, who convinces Pete to leave Maggie and be with her. Maggie tries to return home but her family rejects her.
- The novel ends where Maggie's dead body is eventually found. Mary, her mother, stages a hypocritical melodramatic mourning for her ruined child: "I'll fergive her!"
"The Blue Hotel"
- story of a hotel in Nebraska which sits near the railroad tracks and is blue in color
- a Swede arrives thinking he is in the old West - he gets into a bar fight and dies
"He might have been in a deserted village. We picture the world as thick with conquering and elate humanity, but here, with the bugles of the tempest pealing, it was hard to imagine a peopled earth. One viewed the existence of man then as a marvel, and conceded a glamour of wonder to these lice which were caused to cling to a whirling, fire-smote, ice-locked, disease-stricken, space-lost bulb. The conceit of man was explained by this storm to be the very engine of life. One was a coxcomb not to die in it. However, the Swede found a saloon."
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