They hurried down a platform thronged with fellow passengers similarly
haunted by the seven devils of haste, beneath a high glazed but opaque
vault penning an unappetizing atmosphere composed in equal parts of a
stagnant warm air and stale steam, into a restaurant that had patently
been up all night, through the motions of swallowing alternate
mouthfuls of denatured coffee and dejected rolls, up again and out and
down another platform--at last into the hot and dusty haven of a
parlour-car.
Then impressions found time for readjustment. The journey promised,
and turned out, to be by no means one of unalloyed delights. The early
morning temper discovered by Mrs. Standish offered chill comfort to
one like Sally, saturate with all the emotions of a stray puppy
hankering for a friendly pat. Ensconced in the chair beside her
charge, the patroness swung it coolly aside until little of her was
visible but the salient curve of a pastel-tinted cheek and buried her
nose in a best-selling novel, ignoring overtures analogous to the
wagging of a propitiatory tail. While Savage, in the chair beyond his
sister, betrayed every evidence of being heartily grateful for a
distance that precluded conversation and to a Providence that
tolerated _Town Topics_. Sally was left to improve her mind with
a copy of _Vanity Fair_, from contemplation of whose text and pictures
she emerged an amateur adventuress sadly wanting in the indispensable
quality of assurance. It wasn't that she feared to measure wits,
intelligence, or even lineage with the elect. But in how many
mysterious ways might she not fall short of the ideal of Good Form?
What--she pondered gloomily, chin in hand, eyes vacantly reviewing a
countryside of notable charms adrowse in the lethargic peace of a
mid-summer morning--what the dickens was Good Form, anyway?
Nothing, not even her own normally keen power of observation, offered
any real enlightenment.
She summed up an hour's studious reflection in the dubious conclusion
that Good Form had something subtly to do with being able to sit
cross-kneed and look arrogantly into the impertinent lens of a
camp-follower's camera--to be impudently self-conscious, that is--to
pose and pose and get away with it.
The train came to a definite stop, and Sally startled up to find Mrs.
Standish, afoot, smiling down at her with all her pretty features
except her eyes, and Mr. Savage smiling in precisely the reverse
fashion.
"All out," he announced. "Change here for the boat. Another
hour, and--as somebody says Henry James says--there, in a manner of
speaking, we all are."
They straggled across a wharf to a fussy small steamer, Mrs. Standish
leading the way with an apprehensive eye for possible acquaintances
and, once established with her brother and Sally in a secluded corner
of the boat's upper deck, uttering her relief in a candid sigh.
"Nobody we know aboard," she added, smiling less tensely at Sally.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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