Miss Garnet said she ought to rejoin her friends, and John started with her.
On their way the dyspeptic stopped them affectionately to offer Barbara a banana, and ask if she and the gentleman were not cousins. Miss Garnet said no, and John enjoyed that way she had of smiling sweetly with her eyes alone. But she smiled just as prettily with her lips also when the woman asked him if he was perfectly sure he hadn't relations in Arkansas named Pumpkinseed—he had such a strong Pumpkinseed look. The questioner tried to urge the banana upon him, assuring him that it was the last of three, which, she said, she wouldn't have bought if she hadn't been so lonesome.
Barbara sat down with her, to John's disgust, a feeling which was not diminished when he passed on to her Northern friends, and Mr. Fair tried very gently to draw him out on the Negro question! When he saw Mrs. Fair glancing about for the porter he sprang to find and send him, but lingered, himself, long among the mirrors to wash and brush up and adjust his necktie.
The cars stopping, he went to the front platform, where the dyspeptic, who was leaving the train, turned to thank him "for all his kindness" with such genuine gratitude that in the haste he quite lost his tongue, and for his only response pushed her anxiously off the steps. He still knew enough, however, to reflect that this probably left Miss Garnet alone, and promptly going in he found her—sitting with the Fairs.
Because she was perishing to have Mr. March again begin where he had left off, she conversed with the Fairs longer than ever and created half a dozen delays out of pure nothings. So that when she and John were once more alone together he talked hither and yon for a short while before he asked her where the poems were.
Nevertheless she was extremely pleasant. Their fellow-passenger just gone, she said, had praised him without stint, and had quoted him as having said to her, "It isn't always right to do what we have the right to do."
"O pshaw!" warmly exclaimed John, started as if she had touched an inflamed nerve, and reddened, remembering how well Miss Garnet might know what that nerve was, and why it was so sore.
"I wish I knew how to be sen-ten-tious," said Barbara, obliviously.
"It was she led up to it." He laughed. "She said it better, herself, afterward!"
"How did she say it?"