The Entire March Family TrilogyHowells, William Dean
General
The Entire March Family Trilogy
Howells, William Dean
Fiction; Literature -- Collections
As they passed through the house on their way out, they saw the youth
and maiden they had met at the pavilion door. They were seated at a
table; two glasses of beer towered before them; on their plates were
odorous crumbs of Limburger cheese. They both wore a pensive air.
The next morning the illusion that had wrapt the whole earth was gone
with the moonlight. By nine o'clock, when the wedding-journeyers resumed
their way toward Niagara, the heat had already set in with the effect of
ordinary midsummer's heat at high noon. The car into which they got
had come the past night from Albany, and had an air of almost conscious
shabbiness, griminess, and over-use. The seats were covered with
cinders, which also crackled under foot. Dust was on everything,
especially the persons of the crumpled and weary passengers of
overnight. Those who came aboard at Rochester failed to lighten
the spiritual gloom, and presently they sank into the common bodily
wretchedness. The train was somewhat belated, and as it drew nearer
Buffalo they knew the conductor to have abandoned himself to that
blackest of the arts, making time. The long irregular jolt of the
ordinary progress was reduced to an incessant shudder and a quick
lateral motion. The air within the cars was deadly; if a window was
raised, a storm of dust and cinders blew in and quick gusts caught away
the breath. So they sat with closed windows, sweltering and stifling,
and all the faces on which a lively horror was not painted were dull and
damp with apathetic misery.
The incidents were in harmony with the abject physical tone of the
company. There was a quarrel between a thin, shrill-voiced, highly
dressed, much-bedizened Jewess, on the one side, and a fat, greedy old
woman, half asleep, and a boy with large pink transparent ears that
stood out from his head like the handles of a jar, on the other side,
about a seat which the Hebrew wanted, and which the others had kept
filled with packages on the pretense that it was engaged. It was a loud
and fierce quarrel enough, but it won no sort of favor; and when the
Jewess had given a final opinion that the greedy old woman was no
lady, and the boy, who disputed in an ironical temper, replied, “Highly
complimentary, I must say,” there was no sign of relief or other
acknowledgment in any of the spectators, that there had been a quarrel.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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