The whole thing was as Frenchy as tripe in a casserole.
I was wrong, though, a minute ago when I said there remained nothing
to remind us of the right little, tight little island we had just
quit; for we had two Englishmen in our compartment--fit and proper
representatives of a certain breed of Englishman. They were tall
and lean, and had the languid eyes and the long, weary faces and
the yellow buck teeth of weary cart-horses, and they each wore a
fixed expression of intense gloom. You felt sure it was a fixed
expression because any person with such an expression would change
it if he could do so by anything short of a surgical operation.
And it was quite evident they had come mentally prepared to
disapprove of all things and all people in a foreign clime.
Silently, but none the less forcibly, they resented the circumstance
that others should be sharing the same compartment with them--or
sharing the same train, either, for that matter. The compartment
was full, too, which made the situation all the more intolerable:
an elderly English lady with a placid face under a mid-Victorian
bonnet; a young, pretty woman who was either English or American;
the two members of my party, and these two Englishmen.
And when, just as the train was drawing out of Calais, they
discovered that the best two seats, which they had promptly
preempted, belonged to others, and that the seats for which they
held reservations faced rearward, so that they must ride with their
backs to the locomotive--why, that irked them sore and more.
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