belonged to the elder passenger, the kitten to the younger. The one was
a buxom matron, the other a slender maid. In their ages there must have
been a difference of fifteen years; in feature there was still wider
disparity. The elder was a fine-looking woman, and one who prided
herself upon the Junoesque proportions which she occasionally exhibited
in a stroll for exercise up and down the aisle. Yet no one would call
her a beauty. Her eyes were of a somewhat fishy and uncertain blue; the
lids were tinged with an unornamental pink that told of irritation of
the adjacent interior surface and of possible irritability of temper.
Her complexion was of that mottled type which is so sore a trial to its
possessor and yet so inestimable a comfort to social rivals; but her
features were handsome, her teeth fine, her dress, bearing, and demeanor
those of a woman of birth and breeding, and yet one who might have
resented the intimation that she was not strikingly handsome. She looked
like a woman with a will of her own; her head was high, her step was
firm; it was of just such a walk as hers that Virgil wrote his "_vera
incessu patuit dea_," and she made the young man in the section by
himself think of that very passage as he glanced at her from under his
heavy, bushy eyebrows. She looked, moreover, like a woman with a
capacity for influencing people contrary to their will and judgment, and
with a decided fondness for the exercise of that unpopular function.
There was the air of _grande dame_ about her, despite the simplicity of
her dress, which, though of rich material, was severely plain. She wore
no jewelry. Her hands were snugly gloved, and undisfigured by the
distortions of any ring except the marriage circlet. Her manner attested
her a person of consequence in her social circle and one who realized
the fact. She had repelled, though without rudeness or discourtesy, the
garrulous efforts of the motherly knitter to be sociable. She had
promptly inspired the small, candy-crusted explorer with such awe that
he had refrained from further visits after his first confiding attempt