Just then Jimmie came up with my little account.
“Forty-nine francs extra luggage,” he announced.
“What?” I gasped, “on that one trunk?” How grateful I was at that moment for the two stored at Munroe’s!
“Oh, Jimmie,” I cried, “I haven’t got near enough! You’ll have to lend me twenty francs!”
My companion smiled in sweet revenge, and has been almost impossible to travel with since then, but we are one in our rage against paying extra luggage. Just think of buying your clothes once and then paying for them over and over again in every foreign country you travel through! Our clothes will be priceless heirlooms by the time we get home. We can never throw them away. They will be too valuable.
The Jimmies have been so kind to us that we nearly choked over leaving them, but we consoled ourselves after the train left, and proceeded to draw the most invidious comparisons between French sleeping-cars and the rolling palaces we are accustomed to at home. I am ashamed to think that I have made unpleasant remarks upon the discomforts of travel in America. Oh, how ungrateful I have been for past mercies!
My companion is very patient, as a rule, but I heard her restlessly tossing around in her berth, and I said, “What’s the matter?”
“Oh, nothing much. But don’t you think they have arranged the knobs in these mattresses in very curious places?”
Well, it was a little like sleeping on a wood-pile during a continuous earthquake. But that was nothing compared to the news broken to us about eleven o’clock that our luggage would be examined at the German frontier at five o’clock in the morning. That meant being wakened at half past four. But it was quite unnecessary, for we were not asleep.
It was cold and raining. I got up and dressed for the day. But my companion put her seal-skin on over her dressing-gown, and perched her hat on top of that hair of hers, and looked ready to cope with Diana herself.