The black woman rose and ministered to her mistress, muttering in kind monotone consolatory phrases from which “chile” and “honey” occasionally reached Griswold’s ears. The old mammy produced from a bag several toilet bottles, a fresh handkerchief, a hand mirror, and a brush, which she arranged in the empty seat. The silver trinkets glowed brightly against the blue upholstery.
“Thank you, Aunt Phœbe, I’m feeling much better. Just let me alone now, please.”
The girl put aside the white rose for a moment and breathed deeply of the vinaigrette, whose keen, pungent odour stole across the aisle to Griswold. She bent forward, took up the hand mirror, and brushed the hair away from her forehead with half a dozen light strokes. She touched her handkerchief to the cologne flask, passed it across her eyes, and then took up the rose again and settled back with a little sigh of relief. In her new upright position her gaze rested upon Griswold’s newspapers, which he had flung down on the empty half of his section. One of them had fallen open, and lay with its outer page staring with the bold grin of display type.
TWO GOVERNORS AT WAR.
What did the Governor of North Carolina say
to the Governor of South Carolina?
The colour deepened in the girl’s face; a slight frown gathered in her smooth forehead; then she called the coloured woman, and a brief colloquy followed between them. In a moment Griswold was addressed in a tone and manner at once condescending and deferential.
“If yo’ please, suh, would yo’ all ’low my mistus t’ look at yo’ newspapahs?”
“Certainly. Take them along.”
And Griswold, recalled from a passage in his lecture that dealt with contraband munitions of war, handed over the newspapers, and saw them pass into the hands of his fellow-passenger. He had read the newspapers pretty thoroughly, and knew the distribution of their contents, so that he noted with surprise the girl’s immediate absorption in the telegrams from New Orleans relating to the difficulty between the two governors.
As she read she lost, he thought, something of her splendid colour, and at one point in her reading her face went white for a moment, and Griswold saw the paper wrinkle under the tightening grasp of her hands. The tidings from New Orleans had undoubtedly aroused her indignation, which expressed itself further in the rigid lines of her figure as she read, and in the gradual lifting of her head, as though with some new resolution. She seemed to lose account of her surroundings, and several times Griswold was quite sure that he heard her half exclaim, “Preposterous! Infamous!”