He could do so by anything short of a surgical operation.
And it was quite evident they had come mentally prepared to
disapprove of all things and all people in a foreign clime.
Silently, but none the less forcibly, they resented the circumstance
that others should be sharing the same compartment with them - or
sharing the same train, either, for that matter. The compartment
was full, too, which made the situation all the more intolerable:
an elderly English lady with a placid face under a mid-Victorian
bonnet; a young, pretty woman who was either English or American;
the two members of my party, and these two Englishmen.
And when, just as the train was drawing out of Calais, they
discovered that the best two seats, which they had promptly
preempted, belonged to others, and that the seats for which they
held reservations faced rearward, so that they must ride with their
backs to the locomotive - why, that irked them sore and more. I
imagine they wrote a letter to the London Times about it afterward.
As is the pleasing habit of traveling Englishmen, they had brought
with them everything portable they owned. Each one had four or
five large handbags, and a carryall, and a hat box, and his
tea-caddy, and his plaid blanket done up in a shawlstrap, and his
framed picture of the Death of Nelson - and all the rest of it; and
they piled those things in the luggage racks until both the racks
were chock-full; so the rest of us had to hold our baggage in our
laps or sit on it.
