Mrs. Fanshaw jumped at the vehemence of the exclamation.
"How abrupt you are! What I mean to say is that you will hardly want to keep up these reformatory acquaintances. If I were you I should make it a rule to recognize none of them you can by hook or crook avoid. Possibly this girl is superior to most of her class. I don't think you ever mentioned just why she was sent to the refuge?"
Jean's eyes discharged an angry spark.
"You're quite right," she retorted. "I never have."
Mrs. Fanshaw was still waiting in becoming patience for Jean to repair this omission when her train was announced. They rose and faced each other awkwardly.
"Well, good-by," said the elder woman, presenting her cheek.
"Well, good-by," said Jean.
She watched her mother into a car, and through successive windows traced her bustling progress to a seat. Mrs. Fanshaw found no leisure for a last glance outward, and Jean, by aid of certain sharply etched memories, divined that she was absorbed in repelling seat-mates. So occupied, she vanished. Jean could have cried with ease, but sternly denied herself the luxury. She yet retained something of her old boy-like intolerance of the tear-duct, though the refuge, acquainting her with nerves, had dulled the confident edge of her scorn. Tears, she now perceived, like tea, had uses for women other than purely physical.
Happily life's common things still wore a bloom of surpassing freshness for her cloistered eye. This second station, like yet unlike the first; the tardy train, thundering importantly in at last; the stirring flight into the unknown, each served its diverting turn. As dusk settled, the landscape became increasingly littered with signs trumpeting the virtues of breakfast foods, women's wear, or plays current in the metropolitan theatres; while the villages grew smarter in pavement and lighting till she mistook one or two for near suburbs of the great city itself. Then the open spaces grew rare. Did the semblance of a field survive, it was gridironed by streets of the future or sprawled upon by huge factories, formless leviathans of a thousand gleaming eyes. Town linked itself to town.
When they had run for a long time within what she knew must be the limits of the city itself, a brakeman mouthed some unintelligible remark from the door, and the train came to a stop. Jean caught up her bag, but observing that a drummer of flirtatious propensities, who for an hour past had shared her seat, made no move, was left in doubt.