E-text prepared by Robert Shimmin
and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
The Railroad Journey was very long and slow. The Traveling Salesmanwas rather short and quick. And the Young Electrician who lolledacross the car aisle was neither one length nor another, but mostinordinately flexible, like a suit of chain armor.
More than being short and quick, the Traveling Salesman was distinctlyfat and unmistakably dressy in an ostentatiously new and pure-lookingbuff-colored suit, and across the top of the shiny black sample-casethat spanned his knees he sorted and re-sorted with infiniteearnestness a large and varied consignment of "Ladies' Pink and BlueRibbed Undervests." Surely no other man in the whole southward-boundCanadian train could have been at once so ingenuous and so nonchalant.
There was nothing dressy, however, about the Young Electrician. Fromhis huge cowhide boots to the lead smouch that ran from his rough,square chin to the very edge of his astonishingly blond curls, he wasone delicious mess of toil and old clothes and smiling, blue-eyedindifference. And every time that he shrugged his shoulders or crossedhis knees he jingled and jangled incongruously among his coil-boxesand insulators, like some splendid young Viking of old, half blackedup for a modern minstrel show.
More than being absurdly blond and absurdly messy, the YoungElectrician had one of those extraordinarily sweet, extraordinarilyvital, strangely mysterious, utterly unexplainable masculine facesthat fill your senses with an odd, impersonal disquietude, an itchingunrest, like the hazy, teasing reminder of some previous existence ina prehistoric cave, or, more tormenting still, with the tingling,psychic prophecy of some amazing emotional experience yet to come. Thesort of face, in fact, that almost inevitably flares up into a woman'sstartled vision at the one crucial moment in her life when she is notsupposed to be considering alien features.
Out from the servient shoulders of some smooth-tongued Waiter itstares, into the scared dilating pupils of the White Satin Bride withher pledged hand clutching her Bridegroom's sleeve. Up from thegravelly, pick-and-shovel labor of the new-made grave it lifts itsweirdly magnetic eyes to the Widow's tears. Down from some pettedPrinceling's silver-trimmed saddle horse it smiles its electrifying,wistful smile into the Peasant's sodden weariness. Across the slenderwhite rail of an always out-going steamer it stings back into yourgray, land-locked consciousness like the tang of a scarlet spray. Andthe secret of the face, of course, is "Lure"; but to save your soulyou could not decide in any specific case whether the lure is the lureof personality, or the lure of physiognomy—a mere accidental,coincidental, haphazard harmony of forehead and cheek-bone andtwittering facial muscles.
Something, indeed, in the peculiar set of the Young Electrician's jawwarned you quite definitely that if you should ever even so much ashint the small, sentimental word "lure" to him he would most certainly"swat" you on first impulse for a maniac, and on second impulse for aliar—smiling at you all the while in the strange little wrinklytissue round his