Appearances

For more than twenty years, the engineer blows his train whistle every day as he passes the cottage, and "every day, as soon as she heard this signal, a woman had appeared on the back porch of the little house and waved to him." Although he has seen the woman—and later the two women—do this from afar, the engineer nevertheless allows his mind to fill in the gaps about how the women might appear up close. In his mind, he crafts these assumptions about the women's appearance into an idealistic vision, in which he feels very connected to them. The narrator reports, "He felt for them and for the little house in which they lived such tenderness as a man might feel for his own children." As the years pass, this vision builds in strength, until the engineer feels that he knows "their lives...