Since she had undertaken to show Wahaska precisely how to deport itself in the conventional field, Miss Grierson took a maid and a chaperon with her when she went to Florida. But when she returned in April, the maid had been left behind to marry the gamekeeper of one of the millionaire estates on Lake Worth, and little Miss Matthews, the ex-seamstress chaperon, had been dropped off in Illinois to visit relatives.
This is how it chanced that Margery, unwilling to set the Wahaskans a bad example, had telegraphed her father to meet her in St. Louis. Also, it shall account as it may for the far-reaching stroke of fate which seated the Griersons at Griswold's table in the Hotel Chouteau café, and afterward made them his fellow travellers in the north-bound sleeping-car Anita.
When Jasper Grierson travelled alone he was democratic enough to be satisfied with a section in the body of the car. But when Margery's tastes were to be consulted, the drawing-room was none too good. Indeed, as it transpired on the journey northward from St. Louis, the Anita's drawing-room proved to be not good enough.
"It is simply a crude insult, the way they wear out their old, broken-down cars on us up here!" she was protesting to her father, when they came back from the late dining-car breakfast. "You ought to do something about it." Miss Margery was at the moment fresh from "Florida Specials" and the solid-Pullman vestibuled luxuries of eastern winter travel.
Jasper Grierson's smile was a capitalistic acquirement, and some of his fellow-townsmen described it as "cast-iron." But for his daughter it was always indulgent.
"I don't own the railroad yet, Madgie; you'll have to give me a little more time," he pleaded, clipping the tip from a black cigar of heroic proportions and reaching for the box of safety matches.
"I'll begin now, if you are going to smoke that dreadful thing in this stuffy little den," was the unfilial retort; and the daughter found a magazine and exchanged the drawing-room with its threat of asphyxiation for a seat in the body of the car.
For a little while the magazine, or rather the pictures in it, sufficed for a time-killer. Farther along, the panorama of eastern Iowa unrolling itself beside the path of the train served as an alternative to the pictured pages. When both the book and the out-door prospect palled upon her, Miss Margery tried to interest herself in her immediate surroundings.
The material was not promising. Two old ladies dozing in the section diagonally across the aisle, four school-girls munching chocolates and restlessly shifting from seat to seat in the farther half of the car, and the conductor methodically making out his reports in the section opposite, summed up the human interest, or at least the visible part of it. Half-way down the car one of the sections was still curtained and bulkheaded; and when Miss Grierson curled up in her seat and closed her eyes she was wondering vaguely why the porter had left this one section undisturbed in the morning scene-shifting.
The northward-flying train was crossing a river, and the dining-car waiter was crying the luncheon summons, when Margery awoke to realize the comforting fact that she had successfully slept the forenoon away. With the eye-opening came a recurrence of the last-remembered waking thought—the wonder why the curtained section was still undisturbed. When she was leaving the Anita with her father, the explanation suggested itself: of course, the occupant of the middle section must be ill.