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Page 49
He was feeling hurt and angry. Her sudden coldness, following on
the friendliness with which she had talked so long, puzzled and
infuriated him. He felt as though he had been snubbed, and for no
reason.
He resented the defensive magazine, though he had bought it for
her himself. He resented her attitude of having ceased to
recognize his existence. A sadness, a filmy melancholy, crept
over him. He brooded on the unutterable silliness of humanity,
especially the female portion of it, in erecting artificial
barriers to friendship. It was so unreasonable.
At their first meeting, when she might have been excused for
showing defensiveness, she had treated him with unaffected ease.
When that meeting had ended there was a tacit understanding
between them that all the preliminary awkwardnesses of the first
stages of acquaintanceship were to be considered as having been
passed; and that when they met again, if they ever did, it would
be as friends. And here she was, luring him on with apparent
friendliness, and then withdrawing into herself as though he had
presumed.
A rebellious spirit took possession of him. He didn't care! Let
her be cold and distant. He would show her that she had no
monopoly of those qualities. He would not speak to her until she
spoke to him; and when she spoke to him he would freeze her with
his courteous but bleakly aloof indifference.
The train rattled on. Joan read her magazine. Silence reigned in
the second-class compartment. Swindon was reached and passed.
Darkness fell on the land. The journey began to seem interminable
to Ashe; but presently there came a creaking of brakes and the
train jerked itself to another stop. A voice on the platform made
itself heard, calling:
"Market Blandings! Market Blandings Station!"
* * *
The village of Market Blandings is one of those sleepy English
hamlets that modern progress has failed to touch; except by the
addition of a railroad station and a room over the grocer's shop
where moving pictures are on view on Tuesdays and Fridays. The
church is Norman and the intelligence of the majority of the
natives Paleozoic. To alight at Market Blandings Station in the
dusk of a rather chilly Spring day, when the southwest wind has
shifted to due east and the thrifty inhabitants have not yet lit
their windows, is to be smitten with the feeling that one is at
the edge of the world with no friends near.
Ashe, as he stood beside Mr. Peters' baggage and raked the
unsympathetic darkness with a dreary eye, gave himself up to
melancholy. Above him an oil lamp shed a meager light. Along the
platform a small but sturdy porter was juggling with a milk can.
The east wind explored Ashe's system with chilly fingers.
Somewhere out in the darkness into which Mr. Peters and Aline had
already vanished in a large automobile, lay the castle, with its
butler and its fearful code of etiquette. Soon the cart that was
to convey him and the trunks thither would be arriving. He
shivered.
Out of the gloom and into the feeble rays of the oil lamp came
Joan Valentine. She had been away, tucking Aline into the car.
She looked warm and cheerful. She was smiling in the old friendly
way.
If girls realized their responsibilities they would be so careful
when they smiled that they would probably abandon the practice
altogether. There are moments in a man's life when a girl's smile
can have as important results as an explosion of dynamite.
In the course of their brief acquaintance Joan had smiled at Ashe
many times, but the conditions governing those occasions had not
been such as to permit him to be seriously affected. He had been
pleased on such occasions; he had admired her smile in a detached
and critical spirit; but he had not been overwhelmed by it. The
frame of mind necessary for that result had been lacking.
Now, however, after five minutes of solitude on the depressing
platform of Market Blandings Station, he was what the
spiritualists call a sensitive subject. He had reached that depth
of gloom and bodily discomfort when a sudden smile has all the
effect of strong liquor and good news administered
simultaneously, warming the blood and comforting the soul, and
generally turning the world from a bleak desert into a land
flowing with milk and honey.
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