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Miss Carmichael’s air of perfect composure seemed a trifle out of tune with her surroundings; the nice elevation of eyebrow, the slightly questioning curl of the lip as she, for the first time apparently, became aware of the man opposite, seemed to demand a prim drawing-room rather than the atmosphere of the slouching eating-house. "Well, really, I’ve hardly had a chance of finding out."
She turned towards the window a pair of shoulders plainly significant of the burdensome last straw. "Four days and nights in this train"—they were slower in those days—"and now this extra twenty-five minutes!" Miss Carmichael’s famous dimple hid itself in disgust.
Miss Carmichael’s individual toilet service, which was neither handsome nor elaborate, impressed Eudora far more potently in ranking Mary as a personage than did her dignity of office as "gov’ment." "I reckon you-uns must have seen Sist’ Judy up to Miz Dax’s. I hope she war lookin’ right well." There was in the inquiry an unmistakable note of pride. The connection was plainly one to be flaunted.
The entry in Miss Carmichael’s diary, inscribed in malformed characters as the stage jolted over ruts and gullies, reads: "I do not mind telling you, in strictest confidence, ’Dere Diary’—as the little boy called you—that when I so lightly severed my connection with civilization, I had no idea to what an extent I was going in for the prairie primeval.
The horseman who was no horseman dropped Miss Carmichael’s hand and went into the house. Mary wondered if she ought to have been more cordial. From the back door came Leander, with dishcloths, which he began to hang on the line in a dumb, driven sort of way. "Who is she?" asked Mary. "Her?" he interrogated, jerking his head in the direction of the house.
There flashed into Mary Carmichael’s mind a sentence from her physical geography that she had been obliged to commit to heart in her school-days: "A cloud-burst is a sudden, capricious rainfall, as if the whole cloud had been precipitated at once."
They would have liked to rise as a man and ask if there was anything they could do for her. But as a glance towards the end of the table seemed to increase her discomfiture tenfold, they did the kindest and for them the most difficult thing and looked in every direction but Miss Carmichael’s.
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