are
not excited, I thought: 'Does it matter how you and I go southwards? The
pride of the eye, and of the palate, and of the limbs, what can it help
us that this should be sated? We cannot leave our souls behind.' The
history of many of these men and women was written on their faces. I
wondered if my history was written on mine, gazing into the mirrors which
were everywhere, but seeing nothing save that which I had always seen.
Then I smiled, and Yvonne smiled respectfully in response. Was I not part
of the immense pretence that riches bring joy and that life is good? On
every table in the restaurant-cars were bunches of fresh flowers that had
been torn from the South, and would return there dead, having ministered
to the illusion that riches bring joy and that life is good. I hated
that. I could almost have wished that I was travelling southwards in a
slow, slow train, third class, where sorrow at any rate does not wear a
mask. Great grief is democratic, levelling--not downwards but upwards. It
strips away the inessential, and makes brothers. It is impatient with all
the unavailing inventions which obscure the brotherhood of mankind.

I descended from the train restlessly--there were ten minutes to elapse
before the departure--and walked along the platform, glimpsing the faces
in the long procession of windows, and then the flowers and napery in the
two restaurant-cars: wistful all alike, I thought--flowers and faces! How
fanciful, girlishly fanciful, I was! Opposite the door of the first car
stood a gigantic negro in the sober blue and crimson livery of the
International Sleeping Car Company. He wore white gloves, like all the
servants on the train: it was to foster the illusion; it was part of what
we paid for.

'When is luncheon served?' I asked him idly.

He looked massively down at me as I shivered slightly in my furs. He
contemplated me for an instant. He seemed to add me up, antipathetically,
as a product of Western civilization.

'Soon as the train starts, madam,' he replied suavely, in good American,
and resumed nonchalantly his stare into the distance of the platform.

'Thank you!' I said.

I was glad that I had encountered him on that platform and not in the
African bush. I speculated upon the chain of injustice and oppression
that had warped his destiny from what it ought to have been to what it
was. 'And he, too, is human, and knows love and grief and illusion, like
me,' I mused. A few yards further