The Entire March Family TrilogyHowells, William Dean
General
The Entire March Family Trilogy
Howells, William Dean
Fiction; Literature -- Collections
till the train began to move, and at last turned with gleaming eyes and
moist red lips, and panted hard in the excitement of thinking about it,
and could not calm themselves to the dull level of the travel around
them; in the conductor, coldly and inaccessibly vigilant, as he went his
rounds, reaching blindly for the tickets with one hand while he bent his
head from time, to time, and listened with a faint, sarcastic smile to
the questions of passengers who supposed they were going to get some
information out of him; in the trainboy, who passed through on his many
errands with prize candies, gum-drops, pop-corn, papers and magazines,
and distributed books and the police journals with a blind impartiality,
or a prodigious ignorance, or a supernatural perception of character in
those who received them.
A through train from East to West presents some peculiar features as
well as the traits common to all railway travel; and our friends decided
that this was not a very well-dressed company, and would contrast with
the people on an express-train between Boston and New York to no better
advantage than these would show beside the average passengers between
London and Paris. And it seems true that on a westering' line, the
blacking fades gradually from the boots, the hat softens and sinks,
the coat loses its rigor of cut, and the whole person lounges into
increasing informality of costume. I speak of the undressful sex alone:
woman, wherever she is, appears in the last attainable effects of
fashion, which are now all but telegraphic and universal. But most of
the passengers here were men, and they mere plainly of the free-and-easy
West rather than the dapper East. They wore faces thoughtful with the
problem of buying cheap and selling dear, and they could be known by
their silence from the loquacious, acquaintance-making way-travellers.
In these, the mere coming aboard seemed to beget an aggressively
confidential mood. Perhaps they clutched recklessly at any means of
relieving their ennui; or they felt that they might here indulge safely
in the pleasures of autobiography, so dear to all of us; or else, in
view of the many possible catastrophes, they desired to leave some
little memory of themselves behind. At any rate, whenever the train
stopped, the wedding-journeyers caught fragments of the personal
histories of their fellow-passengers which had been rehearsing to those
that sat next the narrators. It was no more than fair that these should
somewhat magnify themselves, and put the best complexion on their
actions and the worst upon their sufferings; that they should all appear
the luckiest or the unluckiest, the healthiest or the sickest, people
that ever were, and should all have made or lost the most money. There
was a prevailing desire among them to make out that they came from or
were going to same very large place; and our friends fancied an actual
mortification in the face of a modest gentleman who got out at Penelope
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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