“Yes,” said Maria, with a curious docility.  She rose.

“You had better buy your ticket back to Amity, and when I come into the station, I think it is better that I should only bow to you, especially if others should happen to be there.  Can I trust you to stay there and not get on board any train but the one which goes to Amity?”

“Yes, you can,” said Maria, with the same docility which was born of utter weariness and the subjection to a stronger will.

She went into the waiting-room and bought her ticket, then sat down on a settee in the dusty, desolate place and waited.  There were two women there besides herself, and they conversed very audibly about their family affairs.  Maria listened absently to astonishing disclosures.  The man in the ticket-office was busy at the telegraph, whose important tick made an accompaniment to the chatter of the women, both middle-aged, and both stout, and both with grievances which they aired with a certain delight.  One had bought a damaged dress-pattern in Ridgewood, and had gone that afternoon to obtain satisfaction.  “I set there in Yates & Upham’s four mortal hours,” said she, in a triumphant tone, “and they kep’ comin’ and askin’ me things, and sayin’ would I do this and that, but I jest stuck to what I said I would do in the first place, and finally they give in.”

“What did you want?” asked the other woman.

“Well, I wanted my money back that I had paid for the dress, and I wanted the dressmaker paid for cuttin’ it—­it was all cut an’ fitted—­and I wanted my fares back and forth paid, too.”

“You don’t mean to say they did all that?” said the other woman, in a tone of admiration.

“Yes, sir, they did.  Finally Mr. Upham himself came and talked with me, and he said he would allow me what I asked.  I tell you I marched out of that store, when I’d got my money back, feelin’ pretty well set up.”

“I should think you would have,” said the other woman, in an admiring tone.  “You do beat the Dutch!”

Then the women fell to talking about the niece of one of them who had been jilted by her lover.  “He treated her as mean as pusley,” one woman said.  “There he’d been keepin’ company with poor Aggie three mortal years, comin’ regular every Wednesday and Sunday night, and settin’ up with her, and keepin’ off other fellers.”

“I think he treated her awful mean,” assented the other woman.  “I don’t know what I would have said if it had been my Mamie.”

Maria detected a covert tone of delight in this woman’s voice.  She realized instinctively that the woman had been jealous that her companion’s niece had been preferred to her daughter, and was secretly glad that she was jilted.  “How does she take it?” she asked.

“She just cries her eyes out, poor child,” her friend answered.  “She sets and cries all day, and I guess she don’t sleep much.  Her mother is thinkin’ of sendin’ her to visit her married sister Lizzie down in Hartford, and see if that won’t divert her mind a little.”