“Remember you!” Phillip had exclaimed tragically. “Of course I shall remember you, Betty! It isn’t that, only. Can’t you understand——”
Betty couldn’t. Neither could she understand that it was necessary that Phillip should kiss her good-by. He tried for a long, long while to explain this to her in such a way that she should discern the imperative nature of it, but without success. In the end he had had to be content with a smiling handshake and a cheerful, undisturbed “Good-by, Phil,” supplemented a moment later by an airy gesture from the drawing-room window that, at least so he found courage to believe, had resemblance to a kiss thrown from small finger tips. He had ridden back to Cambridge in a mood of mingled hope and despair, of happiness and pain—a mood which, although not recognizable as such at the time, is the sweetest of all a lover’s many conditions.
He and John, with a good deal of hand luggage about them, and Tudor Maid between them, were driven into the Terminal one evening and there embarked on the Federal Express, Maid in a baggage car and John and Phillip in the Washington sleeper. John was in fine spirits; Phillip seemed depressed. In journeying it makes a difference whether the object of attraction is before or behind.
[CHAPTER XIII]
If you cross the Potomac at Washington and journey westward for about fifty miles—allowing for the circuitous course taken by the railroad—you will reach Melville Court House in a trifle under two hours; always supposing, however, that the eastbound train isn’t late at the junction, that there are no funeral parties aboard, and that the negroes whose duty it is to coal the tender just across the river have not gone off to Alexandria to spend the day. The first part of the journey lies through a country of low red-clay hills, clad with oak and rhododendron, a rather uninteresting country, where the farms have a mortgaged look and where unpainted structures cluster about the shedlike stations for no other apparent reason than that misery likes company. Yet away from the railroad and its artificial conditions soft stretches of hillside and meadow, interspersed with timbered creeks, hint of fairer and better things.
“It’s a poorish farming country around here,” said Phillip. “You’ll notice a difference after awhile.”
They had the smoking compartment to themselves and were lolling indolently upon the leather seats, their gazes fixed upon the panorama that swept undulatingly past the windows.
“Well, it doesn’t look very enterprising hereabouts,” John responded. “I think if they’d haul away a few of the rotting wagons and farming implements that decorate the landscape the place would have a more prosperous appearance.”