“Well, I’m going to the sitting in the dining car now.” The lady in the raincoat stood up under the dim little lights in the ceiling that shone on her shoulders. Then down her long nose she suggested to them each to come, too. Did she really mean to eat still, and after all that largess? They laughed, as if to urge her by their shock to go on, and the American girl witlessly murmured, “No, I have a letter to write.”

Off she went, that long coat shimmering and rattling. The little boy looked after her, the first sea wind blew in at the opened door, and his cowlick nodded like a dark flower.

“Very grand,” said the Connemara man. “Very high and mighty she is, indeed.”

Out there, nuns, swept by untoward blasts of wind, shrieked soundlessly as in nightmares in the corridors. It must be like the Tunnel of Love for them—the thought drifted into the young sweetheart’s head.

She was so stiff! She struggled up, staggered a little as she left the compartment. All alone she stood in the corridor. A young man went past, soft fair mustache, soft fair hair, combing the hair—oh, delicious. Here came a hat like old Cromwell’s on a lady, who had also a fur cape, a stick, flat turning-out shoes, and a heavy book with a pencil in it. The old lady beat her stick on the floor and made a sweet old man in gaiters and ribbon-tied hat back up into a doorway to let her by. All these people were going into the dining cars. She hung her head out the open corridor window into the Welsh night, which, seen from inside itself—her head in its mouth—could look not black but pale. Wales was formidable, barrier-like. What contours which she could not see were raised out there, dense and heraldic? Once there was a gleam from their lights on the walls of a tunnel, from the everlasting springs that the tunnelers had cut. Should they ever have started, those tunnelers? Sometimes there were sparks. She hung out into the wounded night a minute: let him wish her back.

“What do you do with yourself in England, keep busy?” said the man from Wales, pointing the stem of his pipe at the man from Connemara.

“I do, I raise birds in Sussex, if you’re asking my hobby.”

“A terrific din, I daresay. Birds keep you awake all night?”

“On the contrary. Never notice it for a minute. Of course there are the birds that engage in conversation rather than sing. I might be listening to the conversation.”

“Parrots, you mean. You have parrots? You teach them to talk?”

“Budgies, man. Oh, I did have one that was a lovely talker, but curious, very strange and curious, in his habits of feeding.”

“What was it he ate? How much would you ask for a bird like that?”

“Like what?”

“Parrot that could talk but didn’t eat well, that you were just mentioning you had.”