Star-Dust: A Story of an American GirlHurst, Fannie
General
Star-Dust: A Story of an American Girl
Hurst, Fannie
Entertainers -- United States -- Fiction
She asked a passing porter the time.
"Six-forty-six!"
* * * * *
She slept fitfully, awakening with little exclamations, and once came so
suddenly out of a doze that she awoke sitting bolt upright, bumping her
head against the top of the berth. Cup her hands as she would against
the window pane, she could not see out, but it seemed to her that dawn
must be imminent. She felt for her little watch, leaning to the streak
of light the curtains let in. Ten-five! Not yet midnight. She lay back
on the gritty bed, trembling.
At six o'clock there were still stars, but a coral tremor was against
the sky line and clouds coming up furiously. Suddenly she realized that
the clouds were mountains and that the flat territory had flowed through
the night into Pennsylvania mountains that were like plunging waves, and
with the changed physiognomy, her mood quickened. She would not wait for
the sun, dressing in her berth.
At eight o'clock, and for only the third time in her life, she
breakfasted in a dining car. It was well crowded, the old man in the
skull cap across the aisle from her gouging out an orange. She ordered
with a sense of novelty and thrift, passing on from grilled spring
chicken, bar-le-duc, and honey-dew melon to eggs and bacon. A drummer
with a gold-mounted elk's tooth dangling from his chain ogled her, so
she sat very prim of back, gazing out over flying villages that were
like white-pine toys cut in the cisalpine Alps and invitingly more
clipped and groomed than the straggling Indiana towns of yesterday. She
was cruelly conscious of self, and throughout the meal kept the tail of
her glance darting at her surroundings, dropping a piece of toast once
and apologizing to the waiter, continuing to smile in an agony of strain
after the incident. She ate slowly, her little finger at right angle to
her movements, masticating with closed lips, her napkin constantly
dabbing up at them.
Finally the head waiter, who had been hovering, to Lilly's great
discomfiture, directly at her shoulder, steered a young woman, with a
great deal of very fuzzy light-brown hair about her face, to the empty
seat opposite. She had a certain air of chic, was modishly dressed, wore
no rings except a marriage band, and long pink nails with careful half
moons. With the ripple of a thrill over her, Lilly registered her as
"typical New Yorker." As a matter of fact, she was the wife of a teacher
of physics in Brooklyn Manual Training School, returning from a two
weeks' visit to her mother-in-law in Indianapolis.
She ordered with somewhat of a manner, asking for an immediate cup of
hot water, and to Lilly there was something esoteric even in that. The
sturdy, fine machine of her own body had the crass ability to start off
the day with bacon and eggs. She blushed for the healthiness of
her choice.
A patter of conversation sprang up between them, something like this:
"Would you mind passing me the sugar?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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