She looked with added interest at the bare platform, the forlorn pair of station idlers, the morose baggage man trundling away a lone trunk. He looked up as they passed, started, took off his hat to the recent candidate.
"I like that man," she declared inconsequentially. "He knows you."
The glassed spaces of the observation platform were small defense against the subtle penetration of the winter night. The bland porter navigated down the car aisles, bundling steamer blankets, which radiated inward the body's waves of heat.
"The old life dead, the glad new one born," her husband mused aloud. "Except a man become as a little child again——For it is a heaven we plan."
"A democracy, not a kingdom, dear?"
"Never a kingdom, unless with a queen equally powered; and no subjects. The old subserviences are dying; with us they are dead. A real equality of mating; the slave-woman attitude gone forever, as we are laboring on the mountain to end the slave-man attitude."
"It is a friendly old universe, dear, to fling us together, on the uncertain upwhirl of the lassoed earth, to complement each other...."
"Blossom to blossom, bird to bird, man to woman," he paired.
"Jackson in two hours," he went on, after a pause.
Was he consciously making conversation, to keep her mind off of what must be the burden of its agitated thinking, the growing tumult stirred and heightened by the night's resistless progress toward their own intimate morning? She appreciated the diversion; soon he was deep in the rich memories of easy Jackson days.