In accordance with his principles of economy, he took a third-class ticket at Basle. He could so make better studies of passengers; for, somehow, your first-class people have not character faces. The only character you get out of them is the character of wine they consume. He left the Alps behind him, and rolled all day through the prosaic plains of France; startling the pale little towns, down whose treeless streets the sun shone, oh! so drearily, and taking up boors and market-folks at every monastic station. There was a pretty young girl sitting beside Ralph in the afternoon, but he refused to talk to her, for he was schooling himself, and preferred to scan the features of an odd old couple who got in at Troyes. They were two old people of the country, and they sat together in the descending shadows of the day, quite like in garb and feature, their chins a little peakish, and the hairs of both turning gray. The man was commonplace, as he leaned upon a staff, and between their feet were paniers of purchases they had been making, which the woman regarded indifferently, as if her heart reached farther than her eyes, and met some soft departed scene which she would have none other see. "She has a good face," said Flare. "I wish she would keep there a moment more. By George, she looks like somebody I have known." The old man nodded on his staff. The rumble of the carriages subdued to a lull all lesser talk or murmurs, and the sky afar off brought into sharp relief the two Gallic profiles, close together, as if they were used to reposing so; yet in the language of their deepening lines lay the stories of lives very, very wide apart. "The old girl's face is soft," said Ralph Flare. "She has brightened many a bit of Belgian pike road, and the brown turban on her head is in clever contrast to the silver shimmer of her hairs. How anomalous are life and art! How unconscious is this old lady of the narrow escape she is making from perpetuation! Doubtless she works afield beside that old Jacques Bonhomme, and drinks sour wine or Normandy cider on Sundays. That may be the best fate of Suzette, but it must be an amply dry reformation for any little grisette to contemplate. For such prodigals going home there is no fatted calf slain. No fathers see them afar off and run to place the ring upon their fingers. They renounce precarious gayety for persistent slavery. The keen wit of the student is exchanged for the pipe and mug and dull oath of the boor. I wish every such girl back again to so sallow a fate, and pity her when she gets there." And so, with much unconscious sentimentality, and the two old market people silent before him, Ralph Flare's eyes half closed also, and the lull of the wheels, the long lake streaks of the sedative skies, the coming of great shadows like compulsions to slumber, made his forehead fall and the world go up and down and darken.