"
"You can chatter in the train--you'll have a whole hour to talk about each
other's dress; get in, get in," and William pressed them into a
third-class carriage. They had not seen each other for so long a while,
and there was so much to say that they did not know where to begin. Sarah
was the first to speak.
"I was kind of you to think of me. So you've married, and to him after
all!" she added, lowering her voice.
Esther laughed. "It do seem strange, don't it?"
"You'll tell me all about it," she said. "I wonder we didn't run across
one another before."
They rolled out of the grey station into the light, and the plate-glass
drew the rays together till they burnt the face and hands. They sped
alongside of the upper windows nearly on a level with the red and yellow
chimney-pots; they passed open spaces filled with cranes, old iron, and
stacks of railway sleepers, pictorial advertisements, sky signs, great
gasometers rising round and black in their iron cages over-topping or
nearly the slender spires. A train steamed along a hundred-arched viaduct;
and along a black embankment the other trains rushed by in a whirl of
wheels, bringing thousands of clerks up from the suburbs to their city
toil.
The excursion jogged on, stopping for long intervals before strips of
sordid garden where shirts and pink petticoats were blowing.
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