"Well, Pippa," said the Black Cat, seizing a moment when Mrs. Jacob Wilson had absented herself from the room, "and what do you think of the English?"
The girl of the mill-house pictured the only two she had met.
"I think," she said timidly, "that you are—how say you it—great talkers, yes?"
"Bless my soul!" said he, cutting a loaf of bread with the melancholy of an executioner beheading an esteemed relative; "aren't we?"
VIII
The train for London came round the bend, and drew up, panting, beside the platform. The airman and his little companion glanced into four compartments which were completely filled, and, hearing the admonition of the guard, were forced to enter a first-class carriage containing five occupants, who glared at the intruders with that triumph of rudeness found only on an English railroad.
"Sorry," murmured the airman, and added something unintelligible about the train being full. A fierce-looking gentleman looked up from the Morning Post and lowered the window to its fullest extent. An anemic woman opposite sneezed and fixed a devastating stare on the fierce gentleman. A very young officer of the Guards felt his lip, and stroked that portion of it which was pregnant with promise of mustache, while his mind wandered into the future. Would he cut Lady Dazzrymple's beastly dance, and content himself with only three that evening? Or, dash it all! should he go the whole works? What a bore!… A young woman with a face of deep intensity read the New Statesman, every now and then looking up from its pages (as a horse drinking at a trough will raise its head between draughts), apparently defying any one to challenge her on anything.
With his hands lazily in his coat-pockets, an Australian captain leant back in his corner and took in the freshness and winsomeness of the French girl, with an admiring frankness that inspired sudden doubt in the airman's mind whether it was really desirable to maintain a huge Empire.
For ten minutes, in a funereal silence, the train hurried towards the Metropolis, while the temperature of the compartment, both actually and temperamentally, dropped to freezing-point. Once, as an unusually pretty meadow met her eye (and where are there such meadows as one sees in England?), Pippa emitted an exclamation of delight and clapped her hands.
A look of horror from the fierce gentleman caromed off the Morning Post to the face of the offender. The anemic woman stopped blowing her nose, and concentrated all her energies on a disdainful sniff. The very young Guardsman brought his eyes out of the future, and stared right through the girl—rotten form, what! The intense young woman frowned and made a mental note that she would write an article on "The Girl of To-day"—or, perhaps, a letter to the New Statesman would be more effective. One never knew, these degenerate times, if an author was writing from conviction or merely writing for a living.