“But we both went together.”
“And, before we had made up our minds which should go first and call, up she starts. Lord, how she did laugh!”
“Ay, she did.”
“And says, ‘Now, that’s all my eye and Betty Martin, boys’; and so did we laugh, and I never felt a bit silly either. She was a good sort of girl, she was. Man and woman, I never met the likes of her, never heard tell of the equal of her,” said the sailor musingly.
“Married, Harry?”
“No, nor likely to be, I don’t think. And yourself?”
“Well, I was.... I married Maggie.... It was after the first baby....”
A small boy in a corner could not get on with his novelette: he stared open-mouthed and open-eyed, now and then unconsciously imitating their faces; or he would correct this mere wonderment and become shy and uncomfortable at the frank ways of these men talking aloud in a crowded carriage, and utterly regardless of others, about private matters.
A trim shop assistant pretended to read about the cricket, but listened, and could not conceal his cold contempt for men so sunken as to give themselves away like this.
A dark, thin, genial, pale-faced puritan clerk looked pitifully—with some twinkles of superiority that asked for recognition from his fellow-passengers—these children, for as such he regarded them, and would not wholly condemn.