uslin with an air,
gathering up her petticoat, edged with the coarsest lace, daintily
from the muddy floor, revealing her large feet in heavy shoes and
white stockings. All the young men of the party except the
prospective groom, who sat entirely wrapped in his atmosphere of
grinning, shamefaced consciousness, glanced furtively at her from
time to time. She was quite aware of their glances, but she never
returned them. When a young man looked at her, she said something to
one of the girls, and laughed prettily, striking another pose for
admiration. She never, however, glanced at Carroll as did the two
pretty girls beyond him on the same seat. She seemed to have no
consciousness of any one in the car outside of those of her own race.
Indeed, the whole party, travelling in a strange land, speaking their
strange tongue, gave a curious impression of utter alienty. It was
almost as if they lived apart in their own crystalline sphere of
separation, as if they were as much diverse as inhabitants of Mars,
and yet they were bound on a universal errand, which might have
served to bring them into touch with the rest if anything could.
Carroll gathered an uncanny impression that he might be himself
invisible to these people, that, living in another element, they
actually could not see or fairly sense anything outside. He looked
from them to the two older women of the same race with their
children, and again his pessimistic attitude, evolved from his own
misery, set his mind in a bitterly interrogative attitude. He looked
at the bride and the mistakenly happy mother caressing the
evil-looking child, and a sickening disgust of the whole was over him.

The car started, and proceeded at a terrific speed along the straight
road. Carroll stared past the bulk of the German woman at the flying
landscape. Since noon the sky had become clouded; it threatened snow
if the wind should go down. The earth, which had been sodden with
rain a few days before, the mud from which showed dried on the
countryman's boots, was now frozen in a million wrinkles. The trees
stood leafless, extending their rattling branches, the old
corn-fields flickered with withered streamers; a man was mournfully
spreading dung over a slope of field. His old horse stood between the
shafts with drooping head. The man himself was old, and moved slowly
and painfully. A white beard of unusual length blew over his right
shoulder. Everything seemed aged and worn and weary, and f