An elderly woman, with hair more white than grey, quietly dressed in black, nodded her head, with a gesture not lacking in respect.
"Are you sure that is all?" resumed Mabel Clarke, with a slight frown of her dark chestnut eyebrows on the white forehead. "Eighteen seems very few for mamma and me."
"Mrs. Clarke expects four boxes from Paris. Everything was not ready from the tailor's to leave with us."
"Ah, very well, then!" murmured Mabel Clarke, nodding her head. Turning her back, she approached her mother, who, patiently seated beneath the station roof near a little buffet table, had been served with a cup of coffee, which she was not drinking.
Mabel had continually to pass different groups of people who were massing together for departure. Pushed about and jostled, she reached her mother at last, and asked, with a little smile:
"All right, mamma?"
"All right, rather bored," replied Mrs. Clarke, shaking her head, as she regarded the crowd with a lofty and silent expression of fastidiousness.
Men, women, and children were coming and going; strolling, stopping, and running. There were old ladies dressed in black, with awkward round hats from which hung a dark blue or brown veil, and who were pressing round their necks large fur tippets against the cold which had surprised them on leaving the train. There were young women dressed brightly, with large, light travelling-cloaks left open, beneath which appeared short skirts and elegantly booted feet, and hats enveloped in white veils. There were children of various ages, watched over carefully by nurses and governesses, and there was even a nurse with a dress of white and grey stripes, a large white and grey cloak, and an encircling cap of white ribbons above her mass of hair: she carried the baby in her arms, wrapped in a little white fur jacket, all rosy in its infantile sleep.
Men of every race and age mingled with the women they were accompanying: they separated from them, returned and disputed. There were fine old men—tall and thin, of energetic and handsome countenance—beardless old men, with invincible, lordly stamp in face and person, and other old men, stout, with heightened complexion and heavy moustaches, with a gay and thoughtless air; then middle-aged men, some of a consumptive appearance, but bearing traces of former virile beauty, others showing signs of pleasures enjoyed too violently. There were robust young men, well made, whose faces, though regular and perfect in feature, lacked expression; while other youths, whose appearance was fashionable, but slender and delicate, had colourless complexions, and in all their aspect an absence of health. On all this curious and attractive variety—a great mass of men of every age—there was a decided ugliness, a common awkwardness, though varied in form, and a proud, harsh expression. According to their ages and conditions this rudeness, imperiousness, and clownishness assumed different aspects, but it was manifest in the high and insolent voices that spoke German, in the gestures, now grotesque and now solemn, but ever imperious—the German crowd dominating nearly all the other nations.