The Indiscreet Letter
The Railroad Journey was very long and slow. The Traveling Salesman was rather short and quick. And the Young Electrician who lolled across the car aisle was neither one length nor another, but most inordinately flexible, like a suit of chain armor. More than being short and quick, the Traveling Salesman was distinctly fat and unmistakably dressy in an ostentatiously new and pure-looking buff-colored suit, and across the top of the shiny black sample-case that spanned his knees he sorted and re-sorted with infinite earnestness a large and varied consignment of "Ladies' Pink and Blue Ribbed Undervests." Surely no other man in the whole southward-bound Canadian train could have been at once so ingenuous and so nonchalant. There was nothing dressy, however, about the Young Electrician. From his huge cowhide boots to the lead smouch that ran from his rough, square chin to the very edge of his astonishingly blond curls, he was one delicious mess of toil and old clothes and smiling, blue-eyed indifference. And every time that he shrugged his shoulders or crossed his knees he jingled and jangled incongruously among his coil-boxes and insulators, like some splendid young Viking of old, half blacked up for a modern minstrel show.
then again you sewed a big crape band on my sleeve.
ASTA. I thought it was the right thing to do.
ALLMERS. [Patting her hand.] Yes, yes, it was the right thing to
do, Asta. And then when we were left alone in the world, we two--.
Are you done already?
ASTA. Yes. [Putting together her sewing-materials.] It was really a
beautiful time for us, Alfred. We two alone.
ALLMERS. Yes, it was--though we had to toil so hard.
ASTA. You toiled.
ALLMERS. [With more life.] Oh, you toiled too, in your way, I can
assure you--[smiling]--my dear, faithful--Eyolf.
ASTA. Oh--you mustn't remind me of that stupid nonsense about the
name.
ALLMERS. Well, if you had been a boy, you would have been called
Eyolf.
ASTA. Yes, if! But when you began to go to college--. [Smiling
involuntarily.] I wonder how you could be so childish.
The Railroad Journey was very long and slow. The Traveling Salesman was rather short and quick. And the Young Electrician who lolled across the car aisle was neither one length nor another, but most inordinately flexible, like a suit of chain armor. More than being short and quick, the Traveling Salesman was distinctly fat and unmistakably dressy in an ostentatiously new and pure-looking buff-colored suit, and across the top of the shiny black sample-case that spanned his knees he sorted and re-sorted with infinite earnestness a large and varied consignment of "Ladies' Pink and Blue Ribbed Undervests." Surely no other man in the whole southward-bound Canadian train could have been at once so ingenuous and so nonchalant. There was nothing dressy, however, about the Young Electrician. From his huge cowhide boots to the lead smouch that ran from his rough, square chin to the very edge of his astonishingly blond curls, he was one delicious mess of toil and old clothes and smiling, blue-eyed indifference. And every time that he shrugged his shoulders or crossed his knees he jingled and jangled incongruously among his coil-boxes and insulators, like some splendid young Viking of old, half blacked up for a modern minstrel show.