The editor laughed in a tolerant way. He was a much older man than Trist.
'There seems,' he said suggestively, 'to be more of it round the third-class carriages than here.'
'The result, perhaps, of cheap port-wine at home. The poor people are nowhere in the higher walks of sentiment without port-wine.'
The journalist laughed in a somewhat perfunctory way.
'I suppose,' he said, after a pause, 'that you would, if you were a railway director, advocate closing the gates of the platform to all tearful relations?'
'Certainly. Seeing people off is an amusement which ought never to have been instituted.'
'Perhaps, then ... I had better go.'
It was Trist's turn to laugh.
'Not at all,' he said, flipping the ash off his cigar with a backward jerk of the hand—'not at all. I do not anticipate that you will stand snivelling at the carriage-window, and, when the train moves away, wave a limp hand and a damp handkerchief, smiling feebly through your tears.'
The older man looked up at the clock, of which the pointers now indicated the hour for starting.