rbaric." And she was surprised to feel for the first time a rather
scornful indifference to all that was involved in Eugenia's finding them
barbaric. Heavens! What did it matter? In a world so filled with awful
and portentous and glorious human possibilities, how could you bother
about such things?

There was a silence. Mr. Welles and Paul had been standing near,
aimlessly, but now, evidently taking the silence for the inevitable
flatness of the flat period of waiting for a train, Mr. Welles drew the
little boy away. They walked down the cinder-covered side-tracks,
towards where the single baggage truck stood, loaded with elegant,
leather-covered boxes and wicker basket-trunks, marked "E. Mills. S.S.
Savoie. Compagnie Generale Transatlantique." Among them, out of place
and drab, stood one banal department-store trunk labeled, "Welles. 320
Maple Avenue. Macon, Georgia."

The departure of the old man and the little boy left the two women
alone. Eugenia stepped closer to Marise and took her hand in her own
gloved fingers. She looked at it intently, with the expression of one
who is trying to find words for a complicated feeling. Marise made an
effort to put herself in the receptive mood which would make the saying
of it easier, but failed. The fall of the big pine roared too loudly in
her ears. She looked without sympathy or admiration at Eugenia's
perfection of aspect. "To look like that, she must care for looks more
than anything else. What can she know about any real human feeling?"
Marise asked herself, with an intolerance she could not mitigate.

And yet as she continued to peer at Eugenia through that dark cloud of
tragedy, it seemed to her that Eugenia showed signs of some real human
emotion. As she gazed at her in the crude brilliance of the gaudy
morning sun, she saw for the first time signs of years in Eugenia's
exquisite small face. There was not a line visible, nor a faltering of
the firmness of the well-cared-for flesh, but over it all was a faint,
hardly discernible flaccid fatigue of texture.

But perhaps she imagined it, for even as she looked, and felt her heart
soften to think what this would mean to Eugenia, an inner wave of
resolution reached the surface of the other woman's face, and there was
Eugenia as she always had been, something of loveliness immutable.

She said impulsively, "Eugenia, it's a stupidly conventional thing to
say, but it's a pity you never married."

As Eugenia only looked at