“Do you know, I thought you were never going to speak?” she says.
I sit down on the seat beside her.
“I hate being unsociable in a railway journey; but, of course, I couldn’t speak first. And now there’s so little time left,” she adds, regretfully.
“Where are you going—not to Chattanooga?”
“Only to Scott’s Plains. What’s your name?”
“Horatio Higginbotham,” I have to reply, fearing she will laugh, though the name is well known in Salem. She does not laugh at all, but smiles divinely.
“My name is Jeanie Bruce. And that’s my sister May. Come over, and I’ll introduce you.”
We walk across the car and Miss Jeanie says to Miss May (who, it appears, is not asleep), “May, I want to introduce to you my friend, Mr. Higginbotham. Mr. Higginbotham, Miss May Bruce.”
I bow to the more languid beauty, who does not rise, but smiles a twin sister of Miss Jeanie’s smile, showing her little white teeth and tapping her little foot in a way to make a man distracted which to look at.
“I thought you didn’t seem to be getting on very well,” says the recumbent May, “but now, I suppose, I can go to sleep,” and she pulls the lace handkerchief back over her eyes, and Jeanie leads me (it is the word) back to our seat on the other side of the car. “We are twin sisters; and some people can’t tell one from the other. Could you?” And she takes off her hat, pushes the soft black mass back from her brow, and looks at me, frankly, sweetly.