tongue, gave a curious impression of utter alienty.  It was almost as if they lived apart in their own crystalline sphere of separation, as if they were as much diverse as inhabitants of Mars, and yet they were bound on a universal errand, which might have served to bring them into touch with the rest if anything could.  Carroll gathered an uncanny impression that he might be himself invisible to these people, that, living in another element, they actually could not see or fairly sense anything outside.  He looked from them to the two older women of the same race with their children, and again his pessimistic attitude, evolved from his own misery, set his mind in a bitterly interrogative attitude.  He looked at the bride and the mistakenly happy mother caressing the evil-looking child, and a sickening disgust of the whole was over him.

The car started, and proceeded at a terrific speed along the straight road.  Carroll stared past the bulk of the German woman at the flying landscape.  Since noon the sky had become clouded; it threatened snow if the wind should go down.  The earth, which had been sodden with rain a few days before, the mud from which showed dried on the countryman’s boots, was now frozen in a million wrinkles.  The trees stood leafless, extending their rattling branches, the old corn-fields flickered with withered streamers; a man was mournfully spreading dung over a slope of field.  His old horse stood between the shafts with drooping head.  The man himself was old, and moved slowly and painfully.  A white beard of unusual length blew over his right shoulder.  Everything seemed aged and worn and weary, and full of knowledge, to its undoing.  To Carroll, in this mood, even the bridal-party, even the children, seemed as old as age itself, puppets evolved from the ashes of ages, working out a creation-old plan of things.

The car was very close and hot—­in fact, the atmosphere was intolerable—­but he felt chilly.  He pulled his coat closer.  Two young men, countrymen, who had entered from the New Sanderson car, and sat next the German woman, eyed him at the gesture, and their eyes fell with a sort of dull dissent upon his handsome coat.  One said something to the other, and both laughed with boorish malice.  Then one, after glancing at the conductor, whose back was turned as he talked to one of the pretty girls with pompadours, bent his head hastily to the floor.  Then he scraped his foot, and looked aloft with an innocent and unconcerned expression.  One of the pretty girls had observed him, and said something to the conductor, pointing to a printed placard over the man’s head.  The conductor looked at him, but the man did not notice.  He gave his fare, when it was demanded, surlily.  Then he bent his head again, when the conductor had turned again, scraped his foot, and gave a sharp glance at the same time at Carroll’s long coat, which was almost within range.  The German woman suddenly awoke to nervous life and pulled her satin skirt aside, with a look at the offender, to which he was impervious.