Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; New York (N.Y.) -- Fiction; Novelists -- Fiction; Publishers and publishing -- Fiction
The young woman said, “Oh!” and she and the other sat down again, and
she stretched across the fretful child which clung to her, and tried to
open her window. She could not raise it, and the old man who had
answered her question lifted it for her. Then she sank back in her seat,
and her sister, if it was her sister, leaned forward, and seemed to
whisper to her. She put up her hand and thrust the loosened wisp of her
hair back into the knot. To do this she gave the child the pocket-book
which she seemed to have been holding, and she did not take it away
again. The child stopped fretting, and began to pull at its play-thing
to get it open; then it made aimless dabs with it at the back of the car
seat and at its mother’s face. She moved her head patiently from side to
side to escape the blows; and the child entered with more zest into the
sport, and began to laugh and strike harder. Suddenly, mid-way of the
long trestle-work, the child turned towards the window and made a dab at
the sail of a passing sloop. The pocket-book flew from its hand, and the
mother sprang to her feet again with a wail that filled the car. “Oh,
what shall I do! He’s thrown my pocket-book out of the window, and it’s
got every cent of my money in it. Oh, couldn’t they stop the train?”
The child began to cry. The passengers all looked out of the windows on
that side of the aisle; and Ray could see the pocket-book drifting by in
the water. A brakeman whom the young woman’s lamentation had called to
the rescue, passed through the car with a face of sarcastic compassion,
and spoke to the conductor entering from the other end. The conductor
shook his head; the train kept moving slowly on. Of course it was
impossible and useless to stop. The young women leaned forward and
talked anxiously together, as Ray could see from his distant seat; they
gave the conductor their tickets, and explained to him what had
happened; he only shook his head again.
When he came to get Ray’s ticket, the young fellow tried to find out
something about them from him.
“Yes, I guess she told the truth. She had all her money, ten dollars and
some change, in that pocket-book, and of course she gave it to her baby
to play with right by an open window. Just like a woman! They’re just
about as _fit_ as babies to handle money. If they had to earn it, they’d
be different. Some poor fellow’s week’s work was in that pocket-book,
like as not. They don’t look like the sort that would have a great deal
of money to throw out of the window, if they was men.”
“Do you know where they’re going?” Ray asked. “Are they going on any
further?”
“Oh, no. They live in New York. ’Way up on the East Side somewhere.”
“But how will they get there with those two babies? They can’t walk.”
The conductor shrugged. “Guess they’ll have to try it.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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