Page:The Tattooed Countess (1924).pdf/17

 plush chair in the parlour-car, Beside her reposed a black leather travelling-bag and a new novel by Paul Bourget in a yellow paper cover. Propped up against the wall near the window stood a black lace parasol with a carved ivory handle. The car was not crowded and the places opposite, as it happened, remained unoccupied. With a somewhat unconventional, considering her environment, but entirely unself-conscious impulse she placed her little feet with their trim ankles on this seat. Then she made an entirely unsuccessful attempt to read a few more pages in Bourget's novel. Her effort to arouse her interest in literature proving abortive, she permitted her gaze to fall on the landscape outside, where a lambent sun lit up the rolling country, splendid with its vast fields of corn, the half-grown stalks, with their green leaves and tasselled cobs, waving in the slight breeze as far as the eye could reach, so that the train seemed to be passing through the midst of some great inland sea. Occasionally these fields were interrupted by stretches of charming wooded country, by meadows, stocked with cattle, by straggling, nondescript villages, by farmhouses and yards, by brooks, and by rivers which seemed only a trifle larger than the brooks.

These scenes were no more successful than the Bourget novel in capturing the roving attention of the Countess, although her gaze seemed to be focused upon them. Presently, indeed, tears welled to her eyes, and she sought her handkerchief to