She drew a mirror from her bag, not to look at her colouring, of
course, but to arrange a few strands of hair. Turning her head this
way and that, she attended to the disarray due to her haste in dressing
perhaps, as well as to her rush for the train. If a woman's hand and
arm and the particular way she holds her fingers when she shepherds
strands of hair were more awkward, possibly fewer strands would need
attention in public. There is something confidential in these quick
fondling movements which have drawn a reader's eyelashes above the
margin of a newspaper many millions of times. This girl made it an
unusually graceful and leisurely function; and once, when her glance
met Phil's, it seemed not to see that any person was opposite to her,
yet it said: "I know that others are not displeased with what I see in
the mirror; then why should I be?"
The plain girl also had some riotously stray strands of hair, but they
did not concern her. It was not for her to find friendliness in
mirrors.
"Here I am riding the way that the train is going when I like the other
way!" she said, jumping up. "Let us change places."
"You dear mouse! You're always so thoughtful!" said the other
beautiful one, complying.
Now she was facing Phil. Reminded that the suburbs of London were so
uninteresting that he might be caught staring at a face short of the
window instead of looking out it, he began to read his paper
diligently. When they had left the chimney pots behind, he found that
the plain one's objection to riding the way that the train was going
apparently no longer applied; for she crossed over in a sudden,
impulsive movement which seemed characteristic of a restless nature and
with a sweeping gesture out of the window began talking of familiar
landmarks.
Evidently both had been long absent from England, which was not their
home. They mixed French with English in that bi-lingual facility which
does not mean an interlarding of words but bursts of sentences. They
criticised and compared what they saw with the Continent, and of the
two the plain one seemed to get more enthusiasm out of their return.
Having both faces in the tail of his eye, Phil wondered why the plain
one should ever want to travel in the other's company. He drifted into
a comparative analysis of the two: The one with her masses of black
hair, her small forehead, her luminous eyes, straight nose and
expressive mouth, with its full lips and the oval chin--a classic type
of its kind; the other with chestnut hair also in masses, but brushed
unbecomingly back from the high, broad forehead, the large, black-brown
eyes wide apart, a squarish chin and a lump of a nose. Yet analysed
there was a resemblance; the genius touch of a sculptor might have
transformed one face if it were plastic into the other. The features
of one made an ensemble; those of the other were assertively in
rebellion with one another.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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