"What are you thinking of, dear?" she asked.
"Geographically.... Reminiscing.... Bragg County ends in a few miles; my
last speech, before the final one in Main Park, was in the Elks' Hall
here."
She looked with added interest at the bare platform, the forlorn pair of
station idlers, the morose baggage man trundling away a lone trunk. He
looked up as they passed, started, took off his hat to the recent
candidate.
"I like that man," she declared inconsequentially. "He knows you."
The glassed spaces of the observation platform were small defense
against the subtle penetration of the winter night. The bland porter
navigated down the car aisles, bundling steamer blankets, which radiated
inward the body's waves of heat.
"The old life dead, the glad new one born," her husband mused aloud.
"Except a man become as a little child again----For it is a heaven we
plan."
"A democracy, not a kingdom, dear?"
"Never a kingdom, unless with a queen equally powered; and no subjects.
The old subserviences are dying; with us they are dead. A real equality
of mating; the slave-woman attitude gone forever, as we are laboring on
the mountain to end the slave-man attitude."
"It is a friendly old universe, dear, to fling us together, on the
uncertain upwhirl of the lassoed earth, to complement each other...."
"Blossom to blossom, bird to bird, man to woman," he paired.
"Jackson in two hours," he went on, after a pause.
Was he consciously making conversation, to keep her mind off of what
must be the burden of its agitated thinking, the growing tumult stirred
and heightened by the night's resistless progress toward their own
intimate morning? She appreciated the diversion; soon he was deep in the
rich memories of easy Jackson days.
Her mind twisted over other matters at the same time. Marriage meant so
little to a man, compared to what it meant to a woman! Pelham, she
believed, was chaste; he had told her so. There was no way of knowing.
But love accomplished changed woman irrevocably. It seemed unfair. She
re-breathed a silent prayer that she would not find him coarse ... even
a little. It had been disillusioned Dorothy who had warned her that all
men were.... Not her man.
Twice the porter had opened the door with suggestive obtrusiveness; it
must be nearly eleven. Shivering with a disquiet almost unbearable, she
responded to the caressing modulations in his voice, as he told of his
childhood; even though its warmth was caused by recollections of other
arms than her own. His deep affection for his mother, despite the
occasional flippancy he used now, was no secret to the wife.
The whistle wailed rhythmically across the level stubble fields.
His face lit up. "That was Newtown we whizzed by; my father started it.
Hideous place!" But the tone was affectionate.