at his back was a young man, with wraps upon his arm and a traveling bag in his hand, who was flushed and breathing hard with the excitement of hurry, and who drew a long sigh of relief as he put his foot on the bottom step of the coupé.
The young woman had grasped the door and was striving stoutly to drag it to her. “Mais non, monsieur!” she shouted, her voice quivering with vehemence. “Cette compartement est tout reserveé-engageé! J’ai donné sank franc soisante, en Paris, pour moi seulement! Je proteste!”
Sharp blasts from a horn at the rear of the train broke in upon her earnest if uncertain remarks. The official held up one warning hand, while with the other he wrenched the door wide open. He said something of which the girl comprehended only its arbitrary harshness of spirit. Brusquely thrusting a ticket into the young man’s hand, he pushed him up the steps into the compartment, and closed the door upon him with a clang. Arms were waving outside; the tin horn screamed; a throb of reawakened energy thrilled backward through the train.
“I assure you—I am so sorry,” the young man began, still standing by the door. His voice was gentle and deprecatory. His words were English, but the tone was of some other language.
“But I have taken the whole compartment-I paid for it all!” she burst out at him, her voice shaking with indignation. “It is an outrage!”
“I am afraid you are mistaken,” he started to speak again; “you obtained only one seat—I have a ticket for another. If there had been time, I beg you to believe—” The train was moving, and a swift plunge into utter darkness abruptly broke off his speech. After a few moments it became possible to discern vague outlines in the black compartment. The girl had huddled herself on the end cushion at the right. The young man took his seat in the corner to the left, and for three incredibly protracted minutes the tunnel reared its uncanny barrier of bogus night between them. The dim suggestion of light which remained to them revealed constrained and motionless figures drawn rigidly away from each other, and pale averted countenances staring fixedly into the gloom.
All at once they were blinking in a flood of sunshine, and drawing welcome breaths of the new, sweet air which swept through from window to window. The young man’s gaze, decorously turned to his left, was of a sudden struck with the panorama as by a blow. He uttered a little cry of delight to himself, and bent forward with eagerness to grasp as much as he might of what was offered. The broad, hill-rimmed basin of the Seine; the gray towers and shining spires of the ancient town; the blue films of smoke drifting through the autumn haze; the tall black chimneys, the narrow, high poplars, the splashes of vivid color with which the mighty moving picture painted itself—all held him, rapt and trembling, with his face out of the window.
Summarily the darkness descended upon them again. He drew back, settled himself in his seat and recalled the circumstance that he was not alone. It occurred to him to pull up the window, and then instinctively he turned to see if she had taken the same precaution on her side. Thus when the short second tunnel unexpectedly ended, he found himself regarding his companion with wideeyed and surprised intentness.
There were two vacant seats between them, and across this space she returned his scrutiny for a moment; then with a fine show of calm she looked away, out through the broad, rounded panes which constituted the front of the compartment.
To the eye of the young man, she was above all things English. Her garments, her figure, the pose of her head, the consciously competent repose of her profile, the very angle at which the correct gray hat, with its fawn-colored ribbon, crossed the line of the brow above—these spoke loudly to him of the islander. From this fact alone would be inferred a towering personal pride, and an implacable resentment toward those who, no matter how innocently and accidentally, offered injury to that pride. He knew the English well, and it hardly needed this partial view of her face to tell him that she was very angry.
Another young man, under these conditions, might have more frankly asked himself whether the face was a beautiful one. He was conscious that the query had taken shape in his mind, but he gave it no attention. It was the character of the face, instead, which had powerfully impressed him. He recalled with curious minuteness the details of his first glimpse of it—the commanding light in the gray eyes, the tightened curves of the lip, the mantling red on the high, smooth cheek. Was it a pretty face? No—the question would not propound itself. Prettiness had nothing to do with the matter. The personality which looked through the face—that was what affected him.
The compartment seemed filled in some subtle way with the effect of this personality. He looked out of his window again. A beautiful deep valley lay below him now, with densely wooded hills beyond. The delicate tints of the waning season enriched the tracery of foliage close at hand; still the tall chimneys, mixed with poplars, marked the course of the enslaved river, but the factories themselves were kindly hidden here by dark growths of thicket in the shadowed depths.
It was surpassingly beautiful, but its contemplation left him restless. He moved about on his seat, partially lowered the window, put it up again and at last turned his head.
“I am afraid that all the charming landscape is on this side,” he made bold to say. “I will change places with pleasure, if—if you would be so kind.”
“No, thank you,” was her spontaneous and decisive reply. Upon reflection she added in a more deliberate tone: “I should be obliged if you would take the view that conversation is not necessary.”
Some latent strain of temerity amazed the young man by rising to the surface of his mind, under the provocation of this rebuff, and shaping his purpose for him.
“It is only fair to myself, first, however,” he with surprise heard himself declaring, “that I should finish my explanation. You can satisfy yourself readily at Dieppe that your ticket is for only one seat. It is very, easy to make errors of that kind when one does not—that is to say, is not—well, entirely familiar with the language of the country. As to my own part, you will remember that I came only at the last moment. I took my coupé seat a half hour before, because I also wished to be alone, and then I went out to see Jeanne d’Arc’s tower again, and I was nearly too late. If there had been time, I would have found a seat elsewhere—but you yourself saw—”
“Really, I think no more need be said,” broke in his companion. She looked him frankly, coldly in the face as she spoke, and her words seemed in his ears to have metallic edges. “It is plain enough that there was a mistake. As you have suggested, my French is very faulty indeed, and no doubt the misunderstanding is entirely my own. So, since it is unavoidable, there surely need be no more words about it.”
She opened a book at this, put her feet out to the stool in front and ostentatiously disposed herself for deep abstraction in literature.
The young man in turn got out some pamphlets and papers from the pockets of his great-coat, and pretended to divide his attention between these and the scenery outside. In truth, he did not for a moment get the face of this girl out of his thoughts. More than ever now, since she had looked him fully in the eye, it was not a face to be pictured in the brain as other faces of women had been. The luminous substance of the individuality behind the face shone out at him from the pages he stared at, and from the passing vistas of lowland meadows, streams and mill-towns that met his gaze through the window.
He knew so little of women that his mind was quite devoid of materials for any comparative analysis of the effect she produced upon him. He evolved for himself, indeed, the conviction that really this was the first woman, in the genuine and higher meaning of the word, that he had ever met. The recognition of this brought with it an excitement as novel to him as the fact itself. Before ever he had seen her, clinging to the coupé door with her gloved hands and so bravely doing hopeless and tongue-tied battle with
