LITERATURE.

Globe, Volume VII, Issue 786, 28 December 1876, Page 3

LITERATURE.

IN A RAILWAY CARRIAGE. {From the World.) Coming, four days ago, from Nevers to Melun, I was put into a carnage with a lady. She was reading. She looked up when I got in, bowed as I took off my hat to her, and went on with her volume. Of course I contemplated her, and as there was something in her atmosphere and attitude which convinced me that she was worthy to be reconnoitred carefully, I pretended to study a torn newspaper, so as to be able to analyse her without indiscretion through the rent She was, however, so hidden by a dustcloak and an immense brown veil, that I could distinguish nothing of her but the end of a fair curl at the side of her neck and three fingers of the hand which held her book. I would have been rash to attempt to form a reliable estimate of her from such insufficient information as that. So I waited impatiently for more. It was true that the hair was fine and glossy, but, with all my desire to make her out, I felt that I really was not justified in deducting anything decisive about her nature or her social station from one isolated fact. As to her fingers I was in much uncertainty, for the long buttonless Suede glove which covered them was so loose that they remained undefined within it. It was only by close attention that I was able to infer, after scrutinising watchfully, the precise relation between the faint separate movements of the fingers and the glove, that the fingers must probably be singularly slight. She sat so still that I was getting almost angry at her immobility, when suddenlj her right foot wandered out from beneath the cloak. The foot was amazing; so admirably arched, so delicate, s» narrow, and so straight, so full of both ardent character and childlike grace, that its perfection was scarcely credible; it was so wonderful and so alluring that it provoked in me an incandescent ambition to discern as much more as possible of a travelling companion—who I was already convinced—must be delicious all over. The foot remained visible for a few seconds only ; but I learnt it by heart, and can see it still. As she withdrew it she leaned half round, away from me, laid dqjvn her book, and looked out of the window ; in doing so she dropped her hand ; the glove caught against a button of the cloak, and the whole inside wrist was bared. It was a slender transparent wrist, white, nervous, and suggestive ; the blue vein which ran up it was sharply defined and seemed to throb. For a time she remained quite motionless. Then she turned slowly back again, lifted her two hands together, and took off her veil. It was with a curiosity so eager that it reached the height of an emotion that I saw the curtain drawn. The face was neither young nor exactly pretty ; but it was a face to gaze at, for it expressed supreme distinction, a striking purity of thought, and an allpervading melancholy. The skin was pale and strangely diaphanous ; the eyes were gray and large, and full of intense sadness ; the nose and mouth, though not quite cor • rectly shaped were very feminine. She appeared to be about thirty-five I sat looking through my chink, and felt that I had before me no ordinary woman. But there was more to come. With the simplest and most unaffected indifference to my presence, she languidly pulled away her gloves, untied her bonnet strings, took off the bonnet, shook down her cloak, and rose. I was positively startled by the superb beauty of her form. She was extremely tall. HerJ figure was almost absolutely faultless. The waist was marvellously slight, but of a slightness which was manifestly a gift of Nature, and not a product of art; it was as round as a young palm tree and as supple as a reed in the wind. Her one defect was that her shoulders were a little high; but they were so magnificent in their rounded fulnesses, so flexible and yet so firm, so admirably in harmony with the head and chest, that it was scarcely possible to wish them otherwise. Her slate grey silk dress fitted as if it had grown upon her ; it modelled the undulating splendours of her body, from the throat to the hips, with a resolute fidelity which brought out all the fiexuous outlines in full relief. Her hands—which at last I was able to see entirely—were, if possible, even more charming than her figure ; they did not offer one single fault; they realised the whole and highest theory of a hand; delicious in their rare contrast of living colour—opalescent white on the back and mantling red on the palm—small, delicate, and distinguished, they possessed that nervous expressiveness, that eager tenderness of touch, that eloquence of movement, of vitality, of sensation, which constitute the very noblest merits of a hand. The only ring she wore was a long torquoise, which threw up vividly the whiteness of the skin on which it rested. Her hair, though bright and soft, was not abundant; it was combed simply off her temples; it had perhaps less characteristic meaning, less proper life, than the other elements of her person. Her type, as a whole, was both grandly high-bred and subjugatingly seductive. Her face, though infinitely interesting, was, as I have said, not regularly pretty ; but all the rest of her was dazzling. And there she stood, a yard from me, her head and shoulders bending buoyantly backwards, her arms uplifted, in all the plentitude of plastic perfection. And she was as unconscious as she was beautiful; lam quite certain that she did not give one passing thought to the accidental fact that she happened not to be alone. Her object is rising was to reach her bag, which was [in the net. The instant I detected her intention I sprang to the bag and lifted it down for her, feeling somewhat feverish as I did so. The half smile with which she bowed her thanks revealed enough of her teetlr to show that they were very white, but rather large. I returned to my chink, and became tumultuously excited in my contemplation, From the bag she took a little box and a flask, and then she sat down and opened the box. It contained her lunch. With a smile that was on her lips alone, and not in her eyes (I recognised, more and more distinctly, that she was profoundly sad), she held out the open box to me, saving, ‘Voulez-vous partager mon repas, monsieur ? II est compose de sandwiches au beurre d’ecrevisses, et d’un flacon de Mont-rachet-Laguiche. ’ In an instant I was talking to her, eating her nourishment, and thinking she was utterly adorable. (To be continued .)