Aurora Dawn Read Free

of spirits lasted for several hours, as they moved back to the parlor car without a perceptible
     break in Andrew’s epic narrative. Then, just when he was becoming a bit giddy with success (this was in the midst of spilling
     the beans about his current adventure), he thought he noticed a tinge of quiet amusement in the girl’s expression at the wrong
     times. It was impossible to define, much less to challenge, but, illusion or no, it made him uneasy, and his cataract of eloquence
     suddenly lagged to a sluggish trickle, then vanished into the sands of silence.
    The girl, after vainly roweling him with a few more questions, seemed satisfied that he was exhausted, and did a little talking
     herself. Said she:
    “Well, I’m certainly glad I ran into you. This train kills me. I die every time I have to take it. If you knew how I hate
     to get up at three o’clock in the morning to catch a train–I don’t as a rule, I just stay up all night, that’s what I did
     last night, I rhumba’d until two-thirty, then went home, took a shower and changed my clothes. I probably look it. I loathe
     morning trains. I feel so filthy by ten o’clock I can’t bear to touch myself. My face is like a cobblestone street this minute–”
     (it was like the blandest Bavarian cream, thought Andrew). “The only good thing about this train is that it gets me to Mother’s
     six o’clock at night, so that all I do is eat dinner and fall into bed, and that’s one day out of two killed. I visit my mother
     every now and then for a weekend–my parents are divorced. Mother isn’t bad, but her husband is the most horrible goon.”–(The
     word “goon,” a main prop of young feminine conversation in that decade, meant a harmless, fumbling, shambling fellow. It was
     loosely used to refer to all males except the current object of a young lady’s desire.)–“He writes books–novels and biographies
     and things that nobody ever buys. He just wrote a book about Thomas Chatterton–what a pancake! Not that he has to worry, the
     way Mother is fixed. He was her English instructor at Wellesley. Mother is a terrific aesthete, anyway. She had a sensational
     crush on him at college–that’s nothing, I’m mad about my Fine Arts prof and I know he’s a goon, but I can’t help it, he’s
     beautiful–but Mother never outgrew hers. Three and a half years after she married Dad she decided that old Literature A-4
     was the big thing in her life, and she walked out on Dad, leaving me in the middle. I don’t mind it except when I have to
     visit Mother and her husband is around. He’s so polite I could die, and I know he despises me. He always wants to talk about
     school, and how my painting is coming, and–”
    “Do you paint?” interrupted Andrew with some surprise.
    “Yes. Oh, nothing good, yet–but I’ll be good some day. I’m going to spend a year in Mexico as soon as I can talk Dad into
     it. He thinks I’ll be raped by bandits.”
    The porter here put his head and one white, starched sleeve into the car and announced, “Washington, D.C., five minutes.”
    “I change here,” said the girl, cutting off her disquisition abruptly and beginning to wriggle into a camel’s hair coat as
     lethally casual as the rest of her array. Andrew sprang to her assistance and swung a heavy bag down from the rack overhead
     with an easy movement which the girl watched appreciatively. For more than an hour Andrew had been increasingly aware of a
     very awkward circumstance; they had, in this extravagant barter of confidences, somehow neglected the detail of exchanging
     names. They had passed so quickly from formality to the mushroom intimacy which springs up between wayfarers who have no intention
     of meeting again, that Andrew had never introduced himself. He suddenly felt that this was an impossible situation, that she
     must not be allowed to vanish into anonymity.
    “It’s a little late for this,” said he with one of his pearliest