ot 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 busy affair of life. It was not a
particularly sane spectacle, that impatience to be off to some place
that lay not only in the distance, but also in the future--to which no
line of road carries you with absolute certainty across an interval of
time full of every imaginable chance and influence. It is easy enough to
buy a ticket to Cincinnati, but it is somewhat harder to arrive there.
Say that all goes well, is it exactly you who arrive?

In the midst of the disquiet there entered at last an old woman, so very
infirm that she had to be upheld on either hand by her husband and the
hackman who had brought them, while a young girl went before with shawls
and pillows which she arranged upon the seat. There