The Travelling Thirds — Themes and Context

e-and-golden prettiness there was neither question nor enthusiasm, and her thin, graceful figure and alertly poised head received such enhancement as her slender purse afforded. She wore—need I record it?—a travelling-suit of dark-blue brilliantine, short—but at least three inches longer than Catalina’s—and a large hat about whose brim fluttered a blue veil. She admired and a little feared the recent acquisition from California, experiencing for the first time in her life a pleasing suspense in the vagaries of an unusual character. She and all that hitherto pertained to her belonged to that highly refined middle class nowhere so formal and exacting as in the land of the free.

Catalina, who never permitted her relatives to suspect that she was shy, assumed her most stolid expression and abrupt tones.

“It is simple enough. We can go to Spain if we travel third class, and we can’t if we don’t. I want to see Spain more than any country in Europe. I have heard you say more than once that you were wild to see it—the Alhambra and all that—well, anxious, then,” as Mrs. Moulton raised a protesting eyebrow. “I’m wild, if you like. I’d walk, go on mule-back; in short, I’ll go alone if you won’t take me.”

“You will do what?” The color came into Mrs. Moulton’s faded cheek, and she squared herself as for an encounter. Open friction was infrequent, for Mrs. Moulton was nothing if not diplomatic, and Catalina was indifferent. Nevertheless, encounters there had been, and at the finish the Californian had invariably held the middle of the field, insolent and victorious; and Mrs. Moulton had registered a vow that sooner or later she would wave the colors over the prostrate foe.

For thirty-two years she had merged, submerged, her individuality, but in these last four months she had been possessed by a waxing revolt, of an almost passionate desire for a victorious moment. It was her first trip abroad, and she had followed where her energetic husband and daughters listed. Hardly once had she been consulted. Perhaps, removed for the first time from the stultifying environment of habit, she had come to realize what slight rewards are the woman’s who flings her very soul at the feet of others. It was too late to attempt to be an individual in her own family; even did she find the courage she must continue to accept their excessive care—she had a mild form of invalidism—and endeavor to feel grateful that she was owned by the kindest of husbands, and daughters no more selfish than the average; but since the advent of Catalina all the rebellion left in her had become compact and alert. Here was an utterly antagonistic temperament, one beyond her comprehension, individual in a fashion that offended every sensibility; cool, wary, insolently suggesting that she purposed to stalk through life in that hideous get-up, pursuing the unorthodox. She was not only indomitable youth but indomitable savagery, and Mrs. Moulton, of the old and cold Eastern civilization, bristled with a thrill that was almost rapture whenever this unwelcome relative of her husband stared at her in contemptuous silence.

“You will do what? The suggestion that we travel third class is offensive enough—but are you aware that Spanish women never travel even first class alone?”

“I don’t see what that has to do with me. I’m not Spanish; they would assume that I was ‘no lady’ and take no further notice of me; or, if they did—well, I can take care of myself. As for travelling third class, I can’t see that it is any more undignified than travelling second, and its chief recommendations, after its cheapness, are that it won’t be so deadly respectable as second, and that we’ll meet nice, dirty, picturesque, excitable peasants instead of dowdy middle-class people who want all the windows shut. The third-class carriages are generally big, open cars like ours, with wooden seats—no microbes—and at this time of the year all the windows will be open. Now, you can think it over. I am going to invest twenty francs in a Baedeker and study my route.”

She nodded to Mr. Moulton, dropped an almost imperceptible eyelash at Lydia, and, ignoring the others, strode off belligerently towards the Place Bellecour.

Mrs. Moulton turned white. She set her lips. “I shall not go,” she announced.