Their Wedding Journey | Page 7

took such a keen interest in every one, that it would be hard to
say whether they were more concerned in an old gentleman with
vigorously upright iron-gray hair, who sat fronting them, and reading
all the evening papers, or a young man who hurled himself through the
door, bought a ticket with terrific precipitation, burst out again, and
then ran down a departing train before it got out of the station: they
loved the old gentleman for a certain stubborn benevolence of
expression, and if they had been friends of the young man and his
family for generations and felt bound if any harm befell him to go and
break the news gently to his parents, their nerves could not have been
more intimately wrought upon by his hazardous behavior. Still, as they
had their tickets for New York, and he was going out on a merely local
train,--to Brookline, I believe, they could not, even in their anxiety,
repress a feeling of contempt for his unambitious destination.
They were already as completely cut off from local associations and
sympathies as if they were a thousand miles and many months away
from Boston. They enjoyed the lonely flaring of the gas-jets as a gust of
wind drew through the station; they shared the gloom and isolation of a
man who took a seat in the darkest corner of the room, and sat there

with folded arms, the genius of absence. In the patronizing spirit of
travellers in a foreign country they noted and approved the vases of cut-
flowers in the booth of the lady who checked packages, and the pots of
ivy in her windows. "These poor Bostonians," they said; "have some
love of the beautiful in their rugged natures."
But after all was said and thought, it was only eight o'clock, and they
still had an hour to wait.
Basil grew restless, and Isabel said, with a subtile interpretation of his
uneasiness, "I don't want anything to eat, Basil, but I think I know the
weaknesses of men; and you had better go and pass the next half-hour
over a plate of something indigestible."
This was said 'con stizza', the least little suggestion of it; but Basil rose
with shameful alacrity. "Darling, if it's your wish--"
"It's my fate, Basil," said Isabel.
"I'll go," he exclaimed, "because it isn't bridal, and will help us to pass
for old married people."
"No, no, Basil, be honest; fibbing isn't your forte: I wonder you went
into the insurance business; you ought to have been a lawyer. Go
because you like eating, and are hungry, perhaps, or think you may be
so before we get to New York.
"I shall amuse myself well enough here!"
I suppose it is always a little shocking and grievous to a wife when she
recognizes a rival in butchers'-meat and the vegetables of the season.
With her slender relishes for pastry and confectionery and her dainty
habits of lunching, she cannot reconcile with the idea (of) her husband's
capacity for breakfasting, dining, supping, and hot meals at all hours of
the day and night--as they write it on the sign-boards of barbaric
eating-houses. But isabel would have only herself to blame if she had
not perceived this trait of Basil's before marriage. She recurred now, as
his figure disappeared down the station, to memorable instances of his
appetite in their European travels during their first engagement. "Yes,
he ate terribly at Susa, when I was too full of the notion of getting into
Italy to care for bouillon and cold roast chicken. At Rome I thought I
must break with him on account of the wild-boar; and at Heidelberg,
the sausage and the ham!--how could he, in my presence? But I took
him with all his faults,--and was glad to get him," she added, ending her
meditation with a little burst of candor; and she did not even think of

Basil's appetite when he reappeared.
With the thronging of many sorts of people, in parties and singly, into
the waiting room, they became once again mere observers of their kind,
more or less critical in temper, until the crowd grew so that individual
traits were merged in the character of multitude. Even then, they could
catch glimpses of faces so sweet or fine that they made themselves felt
like moments of repose in the tumult, and here and there was
something so grotesque in dress of manner that it showed distinct from
the rest. The ticket-seller's stamp clicked incessantly as he sold tickets
to all points South and West: to New York, Philadelphia, Charleston; to
New Orleans, Chicago, Omaha; to St. Paul, Duluth, St. Louis; and it
would not have been hard to find in that anxious bustle, that unsmiling
eagerness, an image of the whole