"They say so. Also some South American ladies have great pearls and diamonds, mamma."
"Do you believe all of them can be more beautiful than my jewels? Mabel, do you think so?"
And a keen expression of uneasiness, the first that had animated that marble countenance, seized her.
"To me it seems impossible," added Mabel thoughtfully.
"Also to me it seems impossible."
In the next compartment were two ladies alone, who had also taken six places for themselves. One was a woman of thirty, with a very white face slightly coloured as to the cheeks, with two marvellous large eyes of deep grey, somewhat velvety, while the whites of the pupils had a blue reflection. Her mouth was vivid and sinuous, more expressive than beautiful. Her hair was of a very bright and fine chestnut, massed round the neck and waving over the temples. Only the temples showed a streak of blue veins, and the little ears were exceedingly white. One of the hands, bared of its kid glove, showed long, graceful, but bony fingers. She who accompanied her was the image of her, though with thirty more years; but she was very fat, with an expression of perfect good-nature on the broad face and an unexplainable sense of fear in the eyes that had remained childish.
The younger woman was dressed in white cloth; but she wore a long jacket of otter with chinchilla facings of a soft grey, which suited her rather morbid beauty, and she remained huddled in her furs, as if cold, with her head snuggled in the collar. Sometimes she coughed a little. Then her mother started, became disturbed, and questioned her a little anxiously in German. The daughter scarcely replied, in a whisper, and settled herself better in her corner, as she dreamed with closed eyes. A scent of sandal emanated from her, and all the minute, very elegant luggage bore her initials, an "E." and an "L."—Else Landau—with a baronial coronet.
All was silent, too, in a compartment further on, full of ladies. The exquisite French lady, of the faded roses, preserved her aspect of one who neither sees nor hears, since she neither wishes to see nor hear. Her hands, gloved in new white gloves, held an open book, whose title was not to be discovered, since it was hidden in an antique silk book cover. She turned over the pages very seldom, perhaps keeping the book open so as not to occupy herself with her neighbours. There was a dark lady, with fine arched eyebrows, black, passionate eyes, a carnal and florid mouth, and all this beauty augmented and made artificial by the rouge on the cheeks, the black beneath the eyes, and the carmine on the lips. She was still a very young woman, but she was got up like an old one. Every now and then the dark woman, so strangely embellished, exchanged a word with her husband, who came to see her from another compartment, where he had found a seat. The husband was tall and gross, with a rather truculent countenance and big rings on his fingers. They spoke Spanish. The third lady, the English girl, she who was writing post cards in the station at Coire, kept silence behind the window that gave on to the corridor. Now all the virginal purity of her very white face was apparent beneath the slightly blue shadow of her veil. Beneath the mother-of-pearl complexion a rosiness spread itself almost at every beating of the arteries. The closed lips, together with the eyes of periwinkle-blue, which gazed in sweetness and candour, all spoke of the fragile and fascinating beauty of Anglo-Saxon women, whose grace is invincible. Her companion was beside her; but she must have been used to the patient silences of long journeys.
As the train climbed in bizarre curves and loops the great pass of Albula, crossing daring bridges and more daring viaducts, ever climbing from Thusis, from Solis, from Tiefenkastel, not one of those travellers gave a thought to the singular and powerful ascent of the train, as it elevated itself ever more and more towards its lofty point of arrival. Here there was a lively chattering in German, in French, in English, especially in German; there someone was slumbering in his seat; here two men and two women were playing bridge. Others were trying to read big papers like the "Koelnische Zeitung," "The Times," and the "Temps." Some governesses and nurses were watching two or three compartments full of children. A French preceptor, a priest, was talking in a low voice to a youth who was accompanying him; the nurse was walking with her baby in the corridor with slow and heavy step. Now and then some young man came and went hurriedly in the corridor, giving a glance at all the compartments where the ladies were, stopping behind the windows where some feminine profile was to be seen, with particular curiosity at the last compartment, where Mrs. Clarke, very bored with the slow journey, as she said, had lowered the blinds.
No one knew anything, or wished to, of that summer night and its cold gusts passing over the heights of the Lenzerhorn and mounting to Preda, to Filisur, to Bergun, penetrating the heart of the mountains, and issuing from them to cross the deep valleys, leaving to right and left peaks covered with snow, to which no one gave a glance through the windows as they rumbled across fantastic bridges that joined two precipices. No one knew or wished to know how rich with Alpine perfumes was the summer night, nor how the voices of forest, meadow, and waters around the train were forming the great mountain chorus without words. No one knew or wished to know what a tremendous and mortal thing it had been for mind and hands and life of man to construct that iron road of the high mountains, and how many existences had been scattered there. Each trembled with impatience, anticipating the halting of the train at little stations all of wood behind which some houses gleamed white or a church tower rose.