At their first meeting, when she might have been excused for showing defensiveness, she had treated him with unaffected ease.  When that meeting had ended there was a tacit understanding between them that all the preliminary awkwardnesses of the first stages of acquaintanceship were to be considered as having been passed; and that when they met again, if they ever did, it would be as friends.  And here she was, luring him on with apparent friendliness, and then withdrawing into herself as though he had presumed.

A rebellious spirit took possession of him.  He didn’t care!  Let her be cold and distant.  He would show her that she had no monopoly of those qualities.  He would not speak to her until she spoke to him; and when she spoke to him he would freeze her with his courteous but bleakly aloof indifference.

The train rattled on.  Joan read her magazine.  Silence reigned in the second-class compartment.  Swindon was reached and passed.  Darkness fell on the land.  The journey began to seem interminable to Ashe; but presently there came a creaking of brakes and the train jerked itself to another stop.  A voice on the platform made itself heard, calling: 

“Market Blandings!  Market Blandings Station!”

* * *

The village of Market Blandings is one of those sleepy English hamlets that modern progress has failed to touch; except by the addition of a railroad station and a room over the grocer’s shop where moving pictures are on view on Tuesdays and Fridays.  The church is Norman and the intelligence of the majority of the natives Paleozoic.  To alight at Market Blandings Station in the dusk of a rather chilly Spring day, when the southwest wind has shifted to due east and the thrifty inhabitants have not yet lit their windows, is to be smitten with the feeling that one is at the edge of the world with no friends near.

Ashe, as he stood beside Mr. Peters’ baggage and raked the unsympathetic darkness with a dreary eye, gave himself up to melancholy.  Above him an oil lamp shed a meager light.  Along the platform a small but sturdy porter was juggling with a milk can.  The east wind explored Ashe’s system with chilly fingers.

Somewhere out in the darkness into which Mr. Peters and Aline had already vanished in a large automobile, lay the castle, with its butler and its fearful code of etiquette.  Soon the cart that was to convey him and the trunks thither would be arriving.  He shivered.

Out of the gloom and into the feeble rays of the oil lamp came Joan Valentine.  She had been away, tucking Aline into the car.  She looked warm and cheerful.  She was smiling in the old friendly way.

If girls realized their responsibilities they would be so careful when they smiled that they would probably abandon the practice altogether.  There are moments in a man’s life when a girl’s smile can have as important results as an explosion of dynamite.