Willie Beresford Has Gone With
His Mother To Aix-Les-Bains, Like The Dutiful Son That He Is.
They
say that a good son makes a good- But that subject is dismissed to
the background for the present, for we are in a state of armed
neutrality.
He has agreed to wait until the autumn for a final
answer, and I have promised to furnish one by that time. Meanwhile,
we are to continue our acquaintance by post, which is a concession I
would never have allowed if I had had my wits about me.
After paying my last week's bill in Dovermarle Street, including
fees to several servants whom I knew by sight, and several others
whose acquaintance I made for the first time at the moment of
departure, I glanced at my ebbing letter of credit and felt a season
of economy setting in upon me with unusual severity; accordingly, I
made an experiment of coming third-class to Belvern. I handed the
guard a shilling, and he gave me a seat riding backwards in a
carriage with seven other women, all very frumpish, but highly
respectable. As he could not possibly have done any worse for me, I
take it that he considered the shilling a graceful tribute to his
personal charms, but as having no other bearing whatever. The seven
women stared at me throughout the journey. When one is really of
the same blood, and when one does not open one's lips or wave the
stars and stripes in any possible manner, how do they detect the
American? These women looked at me as if I were a highly
interesting anthropoidal ape. It was not because of my attire, for
I was carefully dressed down to a third-class level; yet when I
removed my plain Knox hat and leaned my head back against my
travelling-pillow, an electrical shudder of intense excitement ran
through the entire compartment. When I stooped to tie my shoe
another current was set in motion, and when I took Charles Reade's
White Lies from my portmanteau they glanced at one another as if to
say, 'Would that we could see in what language the book is written!'
As a travelling mystery I reached my highest point at Oxford, for
there I purchased a small basket of plums from a boy who handed them
in at the window of the carriage. After eating a few, I offered the
rest to a dowdy elderly woman on my left who was munching dry
biscuits from a paper bag. 'What next?' was the facial expression
of the entire company. My neighbour accepted the plums, but hid
them in her bag; plainly thinking them poisoned, and believing me to
be a foreign conspirator, conspiring against England through the
medium of her inoffensive person. In the course of the four-hours'
journey, I could account for the strange impression I was making
only upon the theory that it is unusual to comport oneself in a
first-class manner in a third-class carriage.
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