"You're in the wrong thrain, mum; this thrain stops nowhere; this is the ixpress all the way to Cloyne. Out you get, for we want to be goin' on. Right, Larry!"
Miss Grimshaw, dusty and tired, seated in the corner of a first-class carriage, heard the foregoing dialogue, and smiled.
It came to her with a puff of gorse-scented air through the open window of the railway carriage.
"Now," said Miss Grimshaw to herself, "I really believe I am in Ireland."
Up to this, at Kingstown, in her passage through Dublin, and during the long, dusty, dull journey that followed, she had come across nothing especially national. It is not in the grooves of travel that you come across the spirit of Ireland.
Davy Stevens, selling his newspapers on the Carlisle pier at Kingstown, had struck her fancy, but nothing followed him up. The jarvey who drove her from station to station in Dublin was surly and so speechless that he might have been English. The streets were like English streets, the people like English people, the rain like English rain, only worse.
But it was not raining here. Here in the west, the train seemed drawing out of civilisation, into a new world—vast hills and purple moors, great spaces of golden afternoon, unspoiled by city or town, far mountain tops breaking to view and veiled in the loveliness of distance.
"And people go to Switzerland with this at their elbow," said Miss Grimshaw, leaning her chin upon her palm and gazing upon the view.
She was alone in the carriage, and so could place her feet on the opposite cushions. Very pretty little feet they were, too.
V. Grimshaw was dressed with plainness and distinction in a Norfolk jacket and skirt of Harris tweed, a brown Homburg hat, and youth. She did not look more than eighteen, though she was, in fact, twenty-two. Her face, lit by the warm afternoon light, was both practical and pretty; her hair was dark and seemed abundant. Beside her on the cushions of the carriage lay several newspapers—the Athenæum among others—and a book, "Tartarin of Tarascon," in the original French.