indeed enviable.
The trip from Liverpool to London I found to be a green glimpse of England in the shape of a biograph. But the word green, as we say it in our haste, is utterly inadequate to apply to the color of the English landscape. Though of varying shades, it is always green to the nth power; it is a saturated solution of green; it is a green that sinks into the eye with a sensation of indelibility. And as this green flew by me, I watched it from the window of a car most disappointingly like our own Pullmans.
I had hoped for the humorous absurdities of the compartmented English trains. I had almost expected to see sitting opposite me a gentleman dressed in white paper, and I involuntarily watched for a guard who should look at me through a telescope, and say “You’re travelling the wrong way.”
For my most definite impressions of English railway carriages had been gained from my “Alice,” and I was annoyed to find myself booked for a large arm-chair seat in a parlor car, with my luggage checked to its London destination on “the American plan”!
What, pray, was the use of coming abroad, if one was to have all the comforts of home?
As if to add to the unsatisfactoriness of my first impressions of English travel, I found myself sitting opposite a young American woman.
We faced each other across a small table, covered with what seemed to be green baize, but was more likely the reflection of the insistent landscape.
The lady was one of those hopeless, helpless, newly rich, that affect so strongly the standing of Americans in Europe.
She was blatantly pretty, and began to talk at once, apparently quite oblivious of the self-evident fact that I wanted to absorb in silence that flying green, to which her own nature was evidently quite impervious.
“Your first trip?” she said, though I never knew how she guessed it. “My! it must be quite an event in your life. Now it’s only an incident in mine.”
“You come often, then?” said I, not specially interested.
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