Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Novelists -- Fiction; Publishers and publishing -- Fiction
The next evening, under a rich, mild October sky, the train drew in
towards New York over a long stretch of trestle-work spanning a New
Jersey estuary. Ray had thriftily left his sleeper at the station where
he breakfasted, and saved the expense of it for the day’s journey by
taking an ordinary car. He could be free with his dollars when he did
not suppose he might need them; but he thought he should be a fool to
throw one of them away on the mere self-indulgence of a sleeper through
to New York, when he had no use for it more than half way. He
experienced the reward of virtue in the satisfaction he felt at having
that dollar still in his pocket; and he amused himself very well in
making romances about the people who got on and off at different points
throughout the day. He read a good deal in a book he had brought with
him, and imagined a review of it. He talked with passengers who shared
his seat with him, from time to time. He ate ravenously at the station
where the train stopped twenty minutes for dinner, and he took little
supernumerary naps during the course of the afternoon, and pieced out
the broken and abbreviated slumbers of the night. From the last of these
naps he woke with a sort of formless alarm, which he identified
presently as the anxiety he must naturally feel at drawing so near the
great, strange city which had his future in keeping. He was not so
hopeful as he was when he left Midland; but he knew he had really no
more cause now than he had then for being less so.
The train was at a station. Before it started, a brakeman came in and
called out in a voice of formal warning: “This train express to Jersey
City. Passengers for way stations change cars. This train does not stop
between here and Jersey City.”
He went out and shut the door behind him, and at the same time a young
woman with a baby in her arms jumped from her seat and called out, “Oh,
dear, what did he say?”
Another young woman, with another baby in her arms, rose and looked
round, but she did not say anything. She had the place in front of the
first, and their two seats were faced, as if the two young women were
travelling together. Ray noted, with the interest that he felt in all
young women as the elements both of love and of literature, that they
looked a good deal alike, as to complexion and feature. The distraction
of the one who rose first seemed to communicate itself to her dull,
golden-brown hair, and make a wisp of it come loose from the knot at the
back of her head, and stick out at one side. The child in her arms was
fretful, and she did not cease to move it to and fro and up and down,
even in the panic which brought her to her feet. Her demand was launched
at the whole carful of passengers, but one old man answered for all:
“He said, this train doesn’t stop till it gets to Jersey City.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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