It was because her mother would not be in that doorway, waiting; nor anywhere ever again—unless there really is a Heaven.
Joan sat there, too proud to bury her face in her hands or to search for a handkerchief, intensely conscious that people were glancing her way, praying wildly to all her gods to keep her from blubbering aloud; and she looked so like a haughty infant in distress that the young man opposite, he whom she had characterized as a necktie drummer, could not long restrain active sympathy.
"Pardon me," he said awkwardly, leaning toward her. "Are you in some sort of trouble? Anything I can do?"
Joan summoned all her scattered forces to meet this emergency in a manner that would do credit to the precepts of Sister Mary Joseph. She elevated her small red nose, and lifting her eyes to about the level of his scarf-pin (a rather cheap scarf-pin) remarked: "You can go away. I am telling myself sad stories of the death of kings."
The necktie drummer retired, permanently, to the smoking-car.
This victory cheered Joan into momentarily forgetting her mother. Already an adventure to write to the girls! She wished that she had looked a little farther up than the scarf-pin.
Shortly the old lady whose daughter might have been Joan's age if she had lived, invited Joan to be her guest in the dining-car, and was repulsed, coldly and firmly. One hears such tales of wicked old harpies on trains leading trustful girls into the most frightful predicaments!
"No, thank you," said our heroine. "I never have much appetite on trains."
Soon the car was quite empty, and Joan, mopping the last of the tears from her eyes, selected the largest of the chocolates and drew from some recess of her person a white-headed pin. There was also, to be discussed later, a packet of sandwiches, typical Convent affairs—large slabs of bread embracing pale and clammy ham. Joan thought of these with resignation. The odor of broiling beefsteak came back from the car ahead rather poignantly. Joan had lied to the old lady. At eighteen, with every nerve and organ in healthy coöperation, appetite is not likely to fail, on trains or elsewhere. Nor was it as if she did not have the necessary dollar in her pocket. Major Darcy always managed to rise to the occasion somehow when the ladies of his family went traveling. He had a horror of gentlewomen finding themselves among strangers temporarily embarrassed for funds—quite a different affair from a permanent condition of the sort when in the home circle.
She knew that it was expected of her to spend her dollar in riotous living; but she could not forget (the Joans of the world never can forget) that a dollar is the price of a pair of white gloves or a pair of silk stockings. And so she munched her sacrificial sandwiches with a considering eye on the future.