ves. The time had
been when they could have found enough in the conjectural fortunes and
characters of their fellow-passengers to occupy them. This phase of their
youth had lasted long, and the world was still full of novelty and
interest for them; but it required all the charm of the dining-car now to
lay the anxieties that beset them. It was so potent for the moment,
however, that they could take an objective view at their sitting cozily
down there together, as if they had only themselves in the world. They
wondered what the children were doing, the children who possessed them so
intensely when present, and now, by a fantastic operation of absence,
seemed almost non-existents. They tried to be homesick for them, but
failed; they recognized with comfortable self-abhorrence that this was
terrible, but owned a fascination in being alone; at the same time, they
could not imagine how people felt who never had any children. They
contrasted the luxury of dining that way, with every advantage except a
band of music, and the old way of rushing out to snatch a fearful joy at
the lunch-counters of the Worcesier and Springfield and New Haven
stations. They had not gone often to New York since their wedding
journey, but they had gone often enough to have noted the change from the
lunch-counter to the lunch-basket brought in the train, from which you
could subsist with more ease and dignity, but seemed destined to a
superabundance of pickles, whatever you ordered.

They thought well of themselves now that they could be both critical and
tolerant of flavors not very sharply distinguished from one another in
their dinner, and they lingered over their coffee and watched the autumn
landscape through the windows.

"Not quite so loud a pattern of calico this year," he said, with
patronizing forbearance toward the painted woodlands whirling by. "Do you
see how the foreground next the train rushes from us and the background
keeps ahead of us, while the middle distance seems stationary? I don't
think I ever noticed that effect before. There ought to be something
literary in it: retreating past and advancing future and deceitfully
permanent present--something like that?"

His wife brushed some crumbs from her lap before rising. "Yes. You
mustn't waste any of these ideas now."

"Oh no; it would be money out of Fulkerson's pocket."

VII.

They went to a quiet hotel far down-town, and took a small apartment
which they thought they