Consequently, her attitude must be inspired by something she had heard concerning him. What?
He puffed his cigarette and groaned. As far as he could remember, he had never harmed a fly.[220]
XXIII
That night he turned in, greatly depressed. Bad dreams assailed his slumbers—menacing ones like the visions that annoyed Eugene Aram.
And every time he awoke and sat up in his bunk, shaken by the swaying car, he realised that Romance had also its tragic phases—a sample of which he was now enduring. And yet, miserable as he was, a horrid sort of joy neutralised the misery when he recollected that it was Romance, after all, and that he, George Z. Green, was in it up to his neck.
A grey morning—a wet and pallid sky lowering over the brown North Carolina fields—this was his waking view from his tumbled bunk.[221]
Neither his toilet nor his breakfast dispelled the gloom; certainly the speeding landscape did not.
He sat grimly in the observation car, reviewing a dispiriting landscape set with swamps, razorbacks, buzzards, and niggers.