near the tracks. Through one window, in a moment’s glimpse, Eugene saw a room with a round table with a dark cloth upon it, and with the light of a shaded chandelier falling on it, and a dark-haired boy of ten or twelve leaning on the table, reading a book, with his face propped in his hands, and a woman moving busily about the table laying it with plates and knives and forks. And as the train slackened speed, he saw, high up in the topmost floor of an old house that rose straight up from the tracks, a woman come to the window, look for a moment at a canary-bird cage which was hanging in the window, reach up and take it from its hook. She had the rough, blowsy, and somewhat old-fashioned look of a demi-monde of the Renoir period; and yet she was like someone he had known all his life.
They passed long strings of silent, darkened railway compartments, and as they neared the station, several suburban trains steamed past them, loaded with people going home. Some of the trains were the queer little double-deckers that one sees in France: Eugene felt like laughing every time he saw them and yet, with their loads of Frenchmen going home, they too were like something he had always known. As the train came into the station, and slowed down to its halt, he could see a boat-train ready for departure on another track. Sleek as a panther, groomed, opulent, ready, purring softly as a cat, the train waited there like a luxurious projectile, evoking perfectly, and at once, the whole structure of the world of power and wealth and pleasure that had created it. Beyond it one saw the whole universe of pleasure—a world of great hotels and famed resorts, the thrilling structure of the huge, white-breasted liners, and the slanting race and drive of their terrific stacks. One saw behind it the dark coast of France, the flash of beacons, the grey, fortressed harbour walls, the bracelet of their hard, spare lights, and beyond, beyond, one saw the infinite beat and swell of stormy seas, the huge nocturnal slant and blaze of liners racing through immensity, and for ever beyond, beyond, one saw the faint, pale coasts of morning and America, and then the spires and ramparts of the enfabled isle, the legendary and aerial smoke, the stone and steel, of the terrific city.
Now their own train had come to a full stop, and he and Starwick were walking up the quay among the buzzing crowd of people.
Starwick turned and, flushing painfully, said in a constrained and mannered tone:
“Look! Shall I being seeing you again?”
