The train, stuffy and hot, lagged and jolted and stopped, and still I was conscious of only that soul-shifting process of self-facing. The image of Peck, the tortoise, haunted me. At times I dozed or even slept very soundly; though doubled up like a jack-knife, as I was, I could not efface myself even in my sleep. But when I waked, there was still myself--grim, lonely, homeless--haunting me like a stabbed corpse chained to my side. I was recalled to myself at last by the whimpering of children packed in a seat across the aisle from me. They had all piled in together the first night somewhere with much excitement. They were now hungry and frowsy and wretched. There were five of them, red-cheeked and dirty; complaining to their mother who, worn and bedraggled herself, yet never lost patience with one or raised her voice above the soothing pitch in all her consoling. At first I was annoyed by them; then I was amused; then I wondered at her, and at last, I almost envied her, so lonely was I and so content was she with her little brood. Hitched on to the train the second night was a private car, said to be that of someone connected with a vice-president of the road. The name of the official, which I learned later, was the same as that of an old college friend of my father's, and I had often heard my father mention him as his successful rival with his first sweetheart, and he used to tease my mother by recalling the charms of Kitty MacKenzie, the young lady in question, whose red golden hair he declared the most beautiful hair that ever crowned a mortal head--while my mother, I remember, insisted that her hair was merely carroty, and that her beauty, though undeniable, was distinctly of the milkmaid order--a shaft which was will aimed, for my mother's beauty was of the delicate, aristocratic type. The fact was that Mr. Leigh had been a suitor of hers before my father met her, and having been discarded by her, had consoled himself with the pretty girl, to whom my father had been attentive before he met and fell "head over heels in love" with a new star at a college ball. Mr. Leigh, I knew, had gone West, and grown up to be a banker, and I wondered vaguely if by any chance he could be the same person.