The engine was approaching the climax of its daily task. It faltered. Looking out of the window, Mr. Wise described its arrival at the foot of a pronounced hill. The engine gazed up the perspective of its duty, and panted prophetically, as pants an uncle before a game of stump-cricket.
“This hill is always a surprise to the engine,” said Mr. Wise. “Every day it has two or three tries, and yet it never learns the knack.”
The suffragette’s fingers tore at the arm of her chair. It was not only too hot to travel, it was also much too hot to cease to travel. She felt a crisis approaching.
Her window had stopped artistically opposite a little slice of distant world, carved out between the trunks of two great cotton trees. Union Town, perceptibly diminished since its last appearance, languished again around its bay. Against the white water you could see the cathedral and the factory chimneys, the spires of God and the spires of mammon.
The suffragette, as she looked, saw the cathedral spire cock suddenly awry and bend over, like a finger in three joints.
“The heat,” she thought. “I believe I’m dying.”
Almost at once after that the train suffered a great spasm, as though yearning for the top of the hill.
“She’s going to try again,” said Mr. Wise.
The suffragette’s head cocked suddenly awry, she bent over in three joints like a finger, and slid off her chair in a faint.
A prostrated suffragette is a contradiction in terms. This one became a child, lying in ungraceful angles, in need of its mother.