had not great interests at stake; they were generally not highly organized, nervously, and were to all appearances carried as woodenly from one point to another as were the seats of the car.  That afternoon a German woman sat nearly opposite Carroll.  She was well-dressed in a handsome black satin skirt, with an ornate, lace-trimmed waist showing between the folds of her seal cape.  There were smart red velvet roses and a feather in her hat.  She sat with her feet far apart, planted squarely to prevent her enormous slanting bulk from slipping on the high seat.  Her great florid face, a blank of animal cognizance of existence, stared straight ahead, her triple chins were pressed obstinately into the fur collar of her cape.  She was the wife of a prosperous saloon proprietor of Port Willis, which was a city of saloons.  She had herself been nourished on beer, until her naturally strong will had become so heavy that it clogged her own purposes.  Her absently set face had a bewildered scowl as if at some dimly comprehended opposition.  Carroll surveyed her with a sort of irritated wonder.  No mathematical problem could present for him difficulties as insuperable as this other human being, who, in a similar stress to his own, would think of beer instead of chloroform, and of sleep instead of death—­indeed, for whom a similar stress could not exist, so cushioned was both soul and body with stupidity and flesh against the pricks and stabs of life.

Beside Carroll sat, sprawling his ungainly sideways length over the seat, a lank countryman in top-boots red with the earth of the country roads.  His face, lantern-jawed, of the Abraham Lincoln type, lacking the shrewd intelligence of the trained brain, was painfully apathetic.  He had scarcely looked up when Carroll took his seat beside him.  His lantern jaws worked furtively and incessantly with a rotary motion over his quid of tobacco, which he chewed with the humble and rudimentary comfort of an animal over its cud.  He was half-starved on his poor country fare, and the tobacco furnished his stomach with imagination in lieu of solid food.  Now and then he rose and slouched to the door, and returned.  At the other end of the car, opposite, were two Hungarian women, short, squat, heavily oscillating as to hips, clad in full, short skirts, aprons, and gay handkerchiefs over strange faces, at once pitiful, stern, and intimidating.  One of the women was distinctly handsome, with noble features closely framed by a snow-white kerchief.  She had the expression of the pure and unrelenting asceticism of a nun, but four children nearly of an age were with her—­one a baby in her arms, one asleep with heavy head on her shoulder, the other two, a boy and girl, sitting on the seat with their well-shod little feet sticking straight out, and their little Slav faces, softened by infancy, looked unsmilingly out of the opposite window.  The baby in her lap was also strangely sullen and solemn, with an intensely repellent little