They reached details. One of them was on her way home to a place with a tripping gentle name, a fairy keep agleam on a lakeside amidst mountains. To her it was dailiness, life as now she knew it, a hemmed-in loneliness. Visitors came from afar. Found it full of poetry. Saw her perhaps as a part of it, a figure of romance. When their patient voices ceased they were ghosts. Not even ghosts, for they seemed uncreated, seemed never to have lived and yet to preside over life, fixed in their places, an inexorable commentary. Each sat staring before her into space, patient and isolated, undisguised isolation. To imagine them alert and busied with their families about them made them no less sad. Immovable at the centre of their lives was loneliness, its plaints silenced, its source forgotten or unknown. Of what use traveller’s joy? Frivolous, unfounded, dependent altogether on oblivions. One of them was rummaging in a heavy sack made of black twill and corded at the neck. Toys, she said, were there—“_pour mes p’tits enfants_.” “_Ça porte beaucoup de soins, les enfants_,” said the other, and compressed dry lips. The first agreed and they sat back, each in her corner, fallen into silence. Children to them seemed to be not persons but a material, an unvarying substance wearily known to them both and to be handled in that deft adjusting way of the French. Satisfied with this mutual judgment on life, made in camera, they relapsed into contemplation, leaving the air weighted with their shared, secretly scornful, secretly impatient resignation. Yet they were fortunate. Laden with wealth they did not count. It spoke in their complacency. Aspiration asleep. They looked for joy in the wrong place. In this they were humanity, blindly pursuing its way. Their pallid plump faces, so salient, could smile impersonally. Their heads were well-poised above shapely subdued bodies. * * * * * Now that it was empty and the blinds drawn up, the carriage seemed all window, letting in the Swiss morning that was mist opening here and there upon snow still greyed by dawn. Through the one she had just pushed up came life, smoothing away the traces of the night. She lay back in her corner and heard with closed eyes the steady voice of the train. The rattle and clatter of its night-long rush through France seemed to be checked by a sense of achievement, as if now it took its ease, delighting in the coming of day, in the presence of this Switzerland for whose features it was watching through the mist. Incredible that in this same carriage where now she was at peace in morning light she had sat through a flaming darkness, penned and enduring. Lifting weary eyes she boldly surveyed it, saw the soilure and shabbiness the gaslight had screened, saw a friend, grimed with beneficent toil, and turned once more blissfully towards the window and its view of thin mist and dawn-greyed snowfields.