I descended from the train restlessly—­there were ten minutes to elapse before the departure—­and walked along the platform, glimpsing the faces in the long procession of windows, and then the flowers and napery in the two restaurant-cars:  wistful all alike, I thought—­flowers and faces!  How fanciful, girlishly fanciful, I was!  Opposite the door of the first car stood a gigantic negro in the sober blue and crimson livery of the International Sleeping Car Company.  He wore white gloves, like all the servants on the train:  it was to foster the illusion; it was part of what we paid for.

‘When is luncheon served?’ I asked him idly.

He looked massively down at me as I shivered slightly in my furs.  He contemplated me for an instant.  He seemed to add me up, antipathetically, as a product of Western civilization.

‘Soon as the train starts, madam,’ he replied suavely, in good American, and resumed nonchalantly his stare into the distance of the platform.

‘Thank you!’ I said.

I was glad that I had encountered him on that platform and not in the African bush.  I speculated upon the chain of injustice and oppression that had warped his destiny from what it ought to have been to what it was.  ’And he, too, is human, and knows love and grief and illusion, like me,’ I mused.  A few yards further on the engine-driver and stoker were busy with coal and grease.  ’Five minutes hence, and our lives, and our correctness, and our luxury, will be in their grimy hands,’ I said to myself.  Strange world, the world of the train de grand luxe!  But a world of brothers!  I regained my carriage, exactly, after all, as the inhabitants of Torquay regained theirs.

Then the wondrous self-contained microcosm, shimmering with gilt and varnish and crystal, glorious in plush and silk, heavy with souls and all that correct souls could possibly need in twenty hours, gathered itself up and rolled forward, swiftly, and more swiftly, into the wide, gray landscapes of France.  The vibrating and nerve-destroying monotony of a long journey had commenced.  We were summoned by white gloves to luncheon; and we lunched in a gliding palace where the heavenly dreams of a railway director had received their most luscious expression—­and had then been modestly hidden by advertisements of hotels and brandy.  The Southern flowers shook in their slender glasses, and white gloves balanced dishes as if on board ship, and the electric fans revolved ceaselessly.  As I was finishing my meal, a middle-aged woman whom I knew came down the car towards me.  She had evidently not recognised me.

‘How do you do, Miss Kate?’ I accosted her.

It was the younger of Vicary’s two maiden sisters.  I guessed that the other could not be far away.

She hesitated, stopped, and looked down at me, rather as the negro had done.

‘Oh! how do you do, Miss Peel?’ she said distantly, with a nervous simper; and she passed on.