There was a silence.  Mr. Welles and Paul had been standing near, aimlessly, but now, evidently taking the silence for the inevitable flatness of the flat period of waiting for a train, Mr. Welles drew the little boy away.  They walked down the cinder-covered side-tracks, towards where the single baggage truck stood, loaded with elegant, leather-covered boxes and wicker basket-trunks, marked “E.  Mills.  S.S.  Savoie.  Compagnie Generale Transatlantique.”  Among them, out of place and drab, stood one banal department-store trunk labeled, “Welles. 320 Maple Avenue.  Macon, Georgia.”

The departure of the old man and the little boy left the two women alone.  Eugenia stepped closer to Marise and took her hand in her own gloved fingers.  She looked at it intently, with the expression of one who is trying to find words for a complicated feeling.  Marise made an effort to put herself in the receptive mood which would make the saying of it easier, but failed.  The fall of the big pine roared too loudly in her ears.  She looked without sympathy or admiration at Eugenia’s perfection of aspect.  “To look like that, she must care for looks more than anything else.  What can she know about any real human feeling?” Marise asked herself, with an intolerance she could not mitigate.

And yet as she continued to peer at Eugenia through that dark cloud of tragedy, it seemed to her that Eugenia showed signs of some real human emotion.  As she gazed at her in the crude brilliance of the gaudy morning sun, she saw for the first time signs of years in Eugenia’s exquisite small face.  There was not a line visible, nor a faltering of the firmness of the well-cared-for flesh, but over it all was a faint, hardly discernible flaccid fatigue of texture.

But perhaps she imagined it, for even as she looked, and felt her heart soften to think what this would mean to Eugenia, an inner wave of resolution reached the surface of the other woman’s face, and there was Eugenia as she always had been, something of loveliness immutable.

She said impulsively, “Eugenia, it’s a stupidly conventional thing to say, but it’s a pity you never married.”

As Eugenia only looked at her, quietly, she ventured further, “You might really be happier, you know.  There is a great deal of happiness in the right marriage.”  She had never said so much to Eugenia.

Eugenia let Marise’s hand drop and with it, evidently, whatever intention she might have had of saying something difficult to express.  Instead, she advanced with her fastidious, delicate note of irony, “I don’t deny the happiness, if that sort of happiness is what one is after.  But I think my appetite for it . . . that sort . . . is perhaps not quite robust enough to relish it.”

Marise roused herself to try to put a light note of cheerfulness into this last conversation.  “You mean that it seems to you like the coarsely heaped-up goodies set before a farmhand in a country kitchen . . . chicken and butter and honey and fruit and coffee, all good but so profuse and jumbled that they make you turn away?”