The Coast of Bohemia

by William Dean Howells

"Oh, I guess he's all right," said Mrs. Saunders. "But who'd ever have thought of having to take such precautions? I shouldn't think life was worth having on such terms, if I was a girl."

She told Cornelia about this strange social ceremony of chaperonage, which now for the first time practically concerned them.

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X.

The night began to fall an hour before Cornelia's train reached New York, and it drew into the station, through the whirl and dance of parti-colored lights everywhere.

The black porter of the sleeping-ear caught up her bag and carried it out for her, as if he were going to carry it indefinitely; and outside she stood letting him hold it, while she looked about her, scared and bewildered, and the passengers hurrying by, pushed and bumped against her. When she collected her wits sufficiently to take it from him, she pressed on with the rest up toward the front of the station where the crowd frayed out in different directions. At the open doorway giving on the street she stopped, and stood holding her bag, and gazed fearfully out on a line of wild men on the curbstone; they all seemed to be stretching their hands out to her, and they rattled and clamored: "Keb? A keb, a keb, a keb? Want a keb? Keb here! Keb? A keb, a keb, a keb!" They were kept back by a policeman who prevented them from falling upon the passengers, and restored them to order when they yielded by the half-dozen to the fancy that some one had ordered a cab, and started off in the direction of their vehicles, and then rushed back so as not to lose other chances. The sight of Cornelia standing bag in hand there, seemed to drive them to a frenzy of hope; several newsboys, eager to share their prosperity, rushed up and offered her the evening papers.

Cornelia strained forward from the doorway and tried to make out, in the kaleidoscopic pattern of lights, which was the Fourth Avenue car; the street was full of cars and carts and carriages, all going every which way, with a din of bells, and wheels and hoofs that was as if crushed to one clangerous mass by the superior uproar of the railroad trains coming and going on a sort of street-roof overhead. A sickening odor came from the mud of the gutters and the horses and people, and as if a wave of repulsion had struck against every sense in her, the girl turned and fled from the sight and sound and smell of it all into the ladies' waiting-room at her right.

She knew about that room from Mrs. Burton, who had said she could go in there, and fix her hair if it had got tumbled, when she came off the train. But it had been so easy to keep everything just right in the nice dressing-room on the sleeper that she had expected to step out of the station and take a Fourth Avenue car without going into the ladies-room. She found herself the only person in it, except a comfortable, friendly-looking, middle-aged woman, who seemed to be in charge of the place, and was going about with a dust-cloth in her hand. She had such a home-like air, and it was so peaceful there, after all that uproar outside, that Cornelia could hardly keep back the tears, though she knew it was silly, and kept saying so to herself under her breath.

She put her hand-bag down, and went and stood at one of the windows, trying to make up her mind to venture out; and then she began to move back and forth from one window to the other. It must have been this effect of restlessness and anxiety that made the janitress speak to her at last: "Expecting friends to meet you?"

Cornelia turned round and took a good look at the janitress. She decided from her official as well as her personal appearance that she might be trusted, as least provisionally. It had been going through her mind there at the windows what a fool she was to refuse to let Mr. Ludlow come to meet her with that friend of his, and she had been helplessly feigning that she had not refused, and that he was really coming, but was a little late. She was in the act of accepting his apology for the delay when the janitress spoke to her, and she said: "I don't know whether I'd better wait any longer. I was looking for a Fourth Avenue car."