"Porter! Porter! Do you know the name of the man who just hurried in?" "No'm," said the porter. "I reckon he's so broken up he ain't got any name left." "It couldn't be," Mrs. Jimmie mused. "Things can be sometimes," said the porter. "You may make up my berth now," said Mrs. Wellington, forgetting that Anne Gattle was still there. Mrs. Wellington hastened to apologize, and begged her to stay, but the spinster wanted to be far away from the disturbing atmosphere of divorce. She was dreaming already with her eyes open, and she sank into number six in a lotus-eater's reverie. Mrs. Wellington gathered certain things together and took up her handbag, to return to the Women's Room, just as Mrs. Whitcomb came forth from the curtains of her own berth, where she had made certain preliminaries to disrobing, and put on a light, decidedly negligée negligée. The two women collided in the aisle, whirled on one another, as women do when they jostle, recognized each other with wild stares of amazement, set their teeth, and made a simultaneous dash along the corridor, shoulder wrestling with shoulder. They reached the door marked "Women" at the same instant, and as neither would have dreamed of offering the other a courtesy, they squeezed through together in a Kilkenny jumble. CHAPTER XIV THE DORMITORY ON WHEELS Of all the shocking institutions in human history, the sleeping car is the most shocking--or would be, if we were not so used to it. There can be no doubt that we are the most moral nation on earth, for we admit it ourselves. Perhaps we prove it, too, by the Arcadian prosperity of these two-story hotels on wheels, where miscellaneous travelers dwell in complete promiscuity, and sleep almost side by side, in apartments, or compartments, separated only by a plank and a curtain, and guarded only by one sleepy negro. After the fashion of the famous country whose inhabitants earned a meagre sustenance by taking in each other's washing, so in Sleeping Carpathia we attain a meagre respectability by everybody's chaperoning everybody else. So topsy-turvied, indeed, are our notions, once we are aboard a train, that the staterooms alone are regarded with suspicion; we question the motives of those who must have a room to themselves!--a room with a real door! that locks!! And, now, on this sleeping car, prettily named "Snowdrop," scenes were enacting that would have thrown our great-grandmothers into fits--scenes which, if we found them in France, or Japan, we should view with alarm as almost unmentionable evidence of the moral obliquity of those nations.