There was one thing at least of which he
could still feel the spirit of a debutante. In this matter of war he
was not, too, unlike a young girl embarking upon her first
season of opera. Walkely, the next morning, saw this mood
sitting quaintly upon Coleman and cackled with astonishment
and glee. Coleman's usual manner did not return until he
detected Walkely's appreciation of his state and then he
snubbed him according to the ritual of the Sunday editor of the
New York Eclipse. Parenthetically, it
might be said that if Coleman now recalled Nora Black to his
mind at all, it was only to think of her for a moment with ironical
complacence. He had beaten her.
When the train drew out of the station, Coleman felt himself
thrill. Was ever fate less perverse ? War and love-war and
Marjory-were in conjunction both in Greece-and he could tilt
with one lance at both gods. It was a great fine game to play
and no man was ever so blessed in vacations. He was smiling
continually to himself and sometimes actually on the point of
talking aloud. This was despite the
presence in the compartment of two fellow passengers who
preserved in their uncomfortably rigid, icy and uncompromising
manners many of the more or less ridiculous traditions of the
English first class carriage. Coleman's fine humour betrayed him
once into addressing one of these passengers and the man
responded simply with a wide look of incredulity, as if he
discovered that he was travelling in the same compartment with
a zebu.
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