eyness in
contrast with the cheerless scene without. A motherly-looking woman had
produced her knitting, and was blithely clicking away at her needles,
while her enterprising son, a youth of four summers and undaunted
confidence in human nature, tacked up and down the aisle and made
impetuous incursions on the various sections by turns, receiving such
modified welcome as could be accorded features streaked with mingled
candy and cinders, and fingers whose propensity to cling to whatsoever
they touched was due no more to instincts of a predatory nature than to
the adhesive properties of the glucose which formed so large a
constituent of the confections he had been industriously consuming since
early morning. Four men playing whist in the rearmost section, two or
three commercial travellers, whose intimacy with the porter and airs of
easy proprietorship told of an apparent controlling interest in the
road, a young man of reserved manners, reading in a section all by
himself, a baby sleeping quietly upon the seat opposite the two
passengers first mentioned, and a Maltese kitten curled up in the lap of
one of them, completed the list of occupants.

The proximity of the baby and the kitten furnishes strong presumptive
evidence of the sex and general condition of the two passengers referred
to, and renders detail superfluous. A baby rarely travels without a
woman, or a kitten with a woman already encumbered with a baby. The baby
belonged to the elder passenger, the kitten to the younger. The one was
a buxom matron, the other a slender maid. In their ages there must have
been a difference of fifteen years; in feature there was still wider
disparity. The elder was a fine-looking woman, and one who prided
herself upon the Junoesque proportions which she occasionally exhibited
in a stroll for exercise up and down the aisle. Yet no one would call
her a beauty. Her eyes were of a somewhat fishy and uncertain blue; the
lids were tinged with an unornamental pink that told of irritation of
the adjacent interior surface and of possible irritability of temper.
Her complexion was of that mottled type which is so sore a trial to its
possessor and yet so inestimable a comfort to social rivals; but her
features were handsome, her teeth fine, her dress, bearing, and demeanor
those of a woman of birth and breeding, and yet one who might have
resented the intimation that she was not strikingly handsome. She looked
like a woman with a will of h