John March, Southerner

by George Washington Cable

John turned on her a hard glance which instantly softened. It is a singular fact that the length and droop of a girl's eyelashes have great weight in an argument.

"And yet," she resumed, but paused for John to wave away the train-boy with his books.

"And yet what?" asked March, ever so kindly.

"And yet, that first love is everything, is what every woman would like every man to believe, until he learns better." Her steadfast gaze and slow smile made John laugh. He was about to give a railing answer when the brakeman announced twenty minutes for dinner.

"What! It can't——" he looked at his watch. "Why, would you have imagined?"

O yes; her only surprise—a mild one—was that he didn't know it.

At table she sat three seats away, with her Northern friends between; and when they were again roaring over streams, and through hills and valleys, and the commercial travelers, whose number had increased to four, were discussing aërial navigation, and March cut short his after-dinner smoke and came back to resume his conversation, he found Miss Garnet talking to the Fairs, and not to be moved by the fact—which he felt it the merest courtesy to state—that the best views were on the other side of the car.

Thereupon he went to the car's far end and wrote a short letter to his mother, who had exacted the pledge of one a day, which she did not promise to answer.

In this he had some delay. A woman with a disabled mouth, cautiously wiping crumbs off it with a paper napkin, asked him the time of day. She explained that she had loaned her watch—gold—patent lever—to her husband, who was a printer. She said the chain of the watch was made of her mother's hair. She also stated that her husband was an atheist, and had a most singular mole on his back, and that she had been called by telegraph to the care of an aunt taken down with measles and whose husband was a steamboat pilot, and an excellent self-taught banjoist; that she, herself, had in childhood been subject to membranous croup, which had been cured with pulsatilla, which the doctor had been told to prescribe, by his grandmother, in a dream; also that her father, deceased, was a man of the highest refinement, who had invented a stump-extractor; that her sisters were passionately fond of her; that she never spoke to strangers when traveling, but, somehow, he, March, did not seem like a stranger at all; and that she had brought her dinner with her in a pasteboard shirt-box rather than trust railroad cooking, being a dyspeptic. She submitted the empty box in evidence, got him to step to the platform and throw it away, and on his return informed him that it was dyspepsia had disabled her mouth, and not overwork, as she and her sisters had once supposed.

Still March did finish his letter. Then he went and smoked another cigar. And then he came again and found the four traveling men playing whist, Mr. and Mrs. Fair dozing, and Miss Garnet looking out of a window on the other side in a section at the far end of the car, the only one not otherwise occupied.