The slur cut like a rattan, as Judd, perceiving a rare advantage, thoroughly intended that it should. He made it worse by patting her hands as he spoke. She hated him with an almost virtuous intensity as he uttered the sneer. But she said no more about her daughter's impending arrival during the remainder of the ride.
CHAPTER II
The chair car was well filled when Louise somewhat misty-eyed from parting with the doleful group of school intimates who convoyed her to the little station, walked down the aisle just as the train began to move. Not in the least sorry because she was finally leaving school, she was affected by the glumness of the girls who had insisted upon bidding her goodbye at the train; but she had not actually wept at any stage of the parting. Perhaps the tear-reddened eyes and noses of her school friends had slightly touched her risibles; for her by no means latent sense of humor invariably struggled to the surface when she found herself figuring in anything of the nature of a "scene." She was not lacking in what the iron-jowled dowagers call "becoming sensibilities;" but she was habitually self-contained, and tears were unusual with her. Nevertheless, she found difficulty in properly discerning objects, even at close range, as she searched for her place; and it was due to her filmed vision that she took a chair that did not correspond to the number on her Pullman ticket.
Women as well as men pivoted about in their chairs for a second glance at Louise. Her unusual height was emphasized by the loose-fitting fur-lined cloth coat which fell straight from her shoulders to her skirt's hem. When she removed the coat her simple one-piece gown of blue cloth caused cogitating men in surrounding chairs to marvel as to how she had ever contrived to get into it, and, worse, how she would possibly manage to get out of it. The guimpe of the dress was of a creamy embroidery that dissolved bafflingly into the whiteness of her neck.
Louise might have reminded an imaginative traveler, had there been such in the car, of a freshly-blown, firm-petalled chrysanthemum. There are women in whom you first discern an utter, convincing wholesomeness; later you become aware of their beauty. Their wholesomeness, you think upon your first comprehensive glance, is like that of an early vernal breeze, of dew upon clean grass; then the contributing elements of their beauty emerge upon your consciousness as through a succession of lifted veils. Louise Treharne was of this type. Unusually tall, she had none of the raw-boned angularities of the over-trained young woman who makes a fad of gymnasium or out-of-doors activities and who thoughtlessly sacrifices the beauty of contour on the profitless altar of over-athleticism. Slender, yet well rounded, the fine amplitude of her proportions caused her to look several years older than her age. Her face contributed to this effect. It was a face such as the imaginary imaginative traveller might vaguely have associated with the faces of women stamped upon Roman coins. There is a sort of creamy, vivid pallor that, equally with ruddiness, denotes perfect health and vigor. This was Louise's; and the uncommon regularity of her features was tempered and softened by varying phases of expression that spoke of an habitual serenity and a searching common sense. Her hair, of the darkest shade of lustrous auburn, waved back loosely and often a bit rebelliously to the great knotted coil in which it was caught at the back of her finely-lathed head. Her eyes, the corners of which had an almost indistinguishable slant that only became agreeably noticeable when she smiled, were wide and full, and of so dark a brown that, at night or in shadowed rooms, they were often supposed to be black.
She had barely settled herself, chin in palm, to gaze out of the window at the blurred landscape of ice-crusted snow, before she became somewhat confusedly conscious of a loomful figure standing patiently in the aisle beside her. When she suddenly turned her head and surveyed him with calm, questioning eyes, he pulled off his cap of plaid a bit awkwardly and smiled. She mentally observed that his mouth was a trifle over-large; but his smile, for all of that, she thought, was the smile of a man. With the woman's mystifying ability mentally to absorb innumerable details at a mere glance, she noticed (without in the least seeming to notice) that he was of unusual stature and of the type called by women, in their between-themselves appraisals, "delightfully scrubbed-looking;" that he was perhaps a little above thirty; that he had a closely-shaven rugged jaw and somewhat jutting chin, huge, well-cared-for hands, rather closely-cropped brown hair slightly greying at the sides, candid grey eyes with tiny lines of humor and experience running away from their corners. She noticed, too, that he was not wearing gloves, which was satisfying. All of the other men in the over-warm car were wearing their heavy cold-weather gloves, and she was slightly contemptuous of this as an unmasculine affectation. Finally, in the same single glance, she perceived his visible embarrassment....
"Pray don't disturb yourself," he said, fumbling his cap with both hands. ("Why don't all men talk basso?" thought Louise.) "I can reach it without your moving at all, if you will permit me. My bag, you know. There are some papers in it that I want to go over, and——"
He stopped dead and looked quite wretched when Louise came to her feet.
"I am in your chair," she said, as he stooped to pick up a bag that, she now noticed for the first time, was wedged by the seat she had unwittingly taken. She was about to remove her coat to the back of the chair in front—her rightful place, as she quickly remembered when she saw the number on the panel—when he put out a determinedly detaining hand.