When the voice became audibly articulate, it proved to be shouting
blasphemies from the broad chest of a middle-aged man--an Italian of the
type that grows stout and wears whiskers. The man was in _bourgeois_
dress, and he stood with his hat off in front of the small station
building, shaking his thick fist at the sky. No one was on the platform
with him except the railway officials, who seemed in doubt as to their
duties in the matter, and two women. Of one of these there was nothing
to remark except her distress. She wept as she stood at the door of the
waiting-room. Like the second woman, she wore the dress of the
shopkeeping class throughout Europe, with the local black lace veil in
place of a bonnet over her hair. It is of the second woman--O
unfortunate creature!--that this record is made--a record without sequel,
without consequence; but there is nothing to be done in her regard except
so to remember her. And thus much I think I owe after having looked,
from the midst of the negative happiness that is given to so many for a
space of years, at some minutes of her despair. She was hanging on the
man's arm in her entreaties that he would stop the drama he was enacting.
She had wept so hard that her face was disfigured. Across her nose was
the dark purple that comes with overpowering fear. Haydon saw it on the
face of a woman whose child had just been run over in a London street. I
remembered the note in his journal as the woman at Via Reggio, in her
intolerable hour, turned her head my way, her sobs lifting it. She was
afraid that the man would throw himself under the train. She was afraid
that he would be damned for his blasphemies; and as to this her fear was
mortal fear. It was horrible, too, that she was humpbacked and a dwarf.

Not until the train drew away from the station did we lose the clamour.
No one had tried to silence the man or to soothe the woman's horror. But
has any one who saw it forgotten her face? To me for the rest of the day