A muffled figure filled the doorway, entered the carriage, deposited bags. A middle-aged Frenchman, dark, with sallow cheeks bulging above a little pointed beard. Thinking her asleep he moved quietly, arranging his belongings with deft, maturely sociable hands. From one of them a ring gleamed in the gaslight. He showed no sign of relief in escaping into silence, no sign of being alone. Conversation radiated from him. Where, on the train, could he have been so recently talking that at this moment he was almost making remarks into his bag? She closed her eyes, listening to his sounds that sent to a distance the sounds of the train. He had driven away also the outer spaces. The grey and white interior spoke no longer of the strange wide distances of France. He was France at home in a railway carriage, preparing to sleep until, at the end of a definite short space of hours, the Swiss dawn appeared at the windows. Before he came the night had stretched ahead, timeless. A moment’s stillness, and then a sound like the pumping of nitrous-oxide into a bag. She opened her eyes upon him seated opposite with cheeks distended and eyes strained wide above indeed a bag, held to his lips and limply flopping. Bracing herself to the presence either of a lunatic or a pitiful invalid believing himself unobserved, she watched while slowly the bag swelled up and took, obedient to an effort that seemed about to make his eyeballs start from his head, the shape of a cushion, circular about a flattened centre. Setting it down in the corner corresponding to that where lay her own head, he took off his boots, pulled on slippers and pattered out into the corridor where he became audible struggling with a near ventilator that presently gave and clattered home. Tiptoeing back into the carriage where already it seemed that the air grew close, he stood under the light, peering upwards with raised arm. A gentle click, and two little veils slid down over the globe and met, leaving the light quenched to a soft glimmer: beautiful, shrouding hard outlines, keeping watch through the night, speaking of night and travel, yet promising day and the end of travel. But he had not done. He was battling now with the sliding door. It was closing, closed, and the carriage converted into a box almost in darkness and suddenly improper. With a groaning sigh he flung himself down and drew his rug to the margin of the pale disc that was his face and that turned sharply as she rose and passed it to reach the door, and still showed, when the corridor light flowed in through the opened door, a perfect astonishment. His inactivity, while she struggled out with her baggage into the inhospitable corridor checked the words with which she would have explained her inability to remain sealed for the night in a small box. As she pushed the door to she thought she heard a small sound, a sniggering expletive, mirth at the spectacle of British prudery.