It was not because of my attire, for
I was carefully dressed down to a third-class level; yet when I
removed my plain Knox hat and leaned my head back against my
travelling-pillow, an electrical shudder of intense excitement ran
through the entire compartment. When I stooped to tie my shoe
another current was set in motion, and when I took Charles Reade's
White Lies from my portmanteau they glanced at one another as if to
say, 'Would that we could see in what language the book is written!'
As a travelling mystery I reached my highest point at Oxford, for
there I purchased a small basket of plums from a boy who handed them
in at the window of the carriage. After eating a few, I offered the
rest to a dowdy elderly woman on my left who was munching dry
biscuits from a paper bag. 'What next?' was the facial expression
of the entire company. My neighbour accepted the plums, but hid
them in her bag; plainly thinking them poisoned, and believing me to
be a foreign conspirator, conspiring against England through the
medium of her inoffensive person. In the course of the four-hours'
journey, I could account for the strange impression I was making
only upon the theory that it is unusual to comport oneself in a
first-class manner in a third-class carriage. All my companions
chanced to be third-class by birth as well as by ticket, and the
Englishwoman who is born third-class is sometimes deficient in
imagination.
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