While my berth was being turned into its daytime aspect, I was forced to accept a seat beside a stranger: a little man with a black felt hat, a weedy mustache of neutral color, and an Elk's button. I had a feeling that he meant to talk with me; a feeling which amounted to dread. Nothing appeals to me at seven in the morning; least of all a conversation. At that hour my enthusiasm shows only a low blue flame, like a gas jet turned down almost to the point of going out. And in the feeble light of that blue flame, my fellow man becomes a vague shape, threatening unsolicited civilities. I do not like the hour of seven in the morning anywhere, and if there is one condition under which I loathe it most, it is before breakfast in a smelly sleeping car. I saw the little man regarding me. He was about to speak. And there I was, absolutely at his mercy, without so much as a newspaper behind which to shield myself.
"Are you from New York?" he asked.
With about the same amount of effort it would take to make a long after-dinner speech, I managed to enunciate a hollow: "Yes."
"I thought so," he returned.
It seemed to me that the remark required no answer. He waited; then, presently, vouchsafed the added information: "I knew it by your shoes."
Mechanically I looked at my shoes; then at his. I felt like saying: "Why? Because my shoes are polished?" But I didn't. All I said was, "Oh."
"That's a New York last," he explained. "Long and flat. You can't get a shoe like that out in this section. Nobody'd buy 'em if we made 'em." Then he added: "I'm in the shoe line, myself."
He paused as though expecting me to state my "line." However, I didn't. Very likely he thought it something shameful. After a moment's silence, he asked: "Travel out this way much?"
"Never," I said.
"Never been in Kansas City?"