I could find no first-class carriage on the train, and I got into a compartment where there were several girls and one young man.  The girls were evidently employed in the earthenware manufacture.  Each had her dinner-basket.  Most of them were extremely neat; one or two wore gloves.  From the young man’s soiled white jacket under his black coat, I gathered that he was an engineer.  The train moved out of the station and left the platform nearly empty.  I pictured the train, a long procession of compartments like ours, full of rough, natural, ungenteel people.  None of my companions spoke; none gave me more than a passing glance.  It was uncanny.

Still, the fundamental, cardinal quality of my adventure remained prominent in my being, and it gave me countenance among these taciturn, musing workgirls, who were always at grips with the realities of life.  ‘Ah,’ I thought, ’you little know what I know!  I may appear a butterfly, but I have learnt the secret meaning of existence.  I am above you, beyond you, by my experience, and by my terrible situation, and by the turmoil in my heart!’ And then, quite suddenly, I reflected that they probably knew all that I knew, that some of them might have forgotten more than I had ever learnt.  I remembered an absorbing correspondence about the manners of the Five Towns in the columns of the Staffordshire Recorder—­a correspondence which had driven Aunt Constance to conceal the paper after the second week.  I guessed that they might smile at the simplicity of my heart could they see it.  Meaning of existence!  Why, they were reared in it!  The naturalness of natural people and of natural acts struck me like a blow, and I withdrew, whipped, into myself.  My adventure grew smaller.  But I recalled its ecstasies.  I dwelt on the romantic perfection of Diaz.  It seemed to me amazing, incredible, that Diaz, the glorious and incomparable Diaz, had loved me—­me! out of all the ardent, worshipping women that the world contained.  I wondered if he had wakened up, and I felt sorry for him.  So far, I had not decided how soon, if at all, I should communicate with him.  My mind was incapable of reaching past the next few hours—­the next hour.

We stopped at a station surrounded by the evidences of that tireless, unceasing, and tremendous manufacturing industry which distinguishes the Five Towns, and I was left alone in the compartment.  The train rumbled on through a landscape of fiery furnaces, and burning slag-heaps, and foul canals reflecting great smoking chimneys, all steeped in the mild sunshine.  Could the toil-worn agents of this never-ending and gigantic productiveness find time for love?  Perhaps they loved quickly and forgot, like animals.  Thoughts such as these lurked sinister and carnal, strange beasts in the jungle of my poor brain.  Then the train arrived at Shawport, and I was obliged to get out.  I say ‘obliged,’ because I violently wished not to get out.  I wished to travel on in that train to some impossible place, where things were arranged differently.