They had another moment of rich silence when they paused in the gallery that leads from the Elevated station to the waiting-rooms in the Central Depot and looked down upon the great night trains lying on the tracks dim under the rain of gas-lights that starred without dispersing the vast darkness of the place.

What forces, what fates, slept in these bulks which would soon be hurling themselves north and south and west through the night! Now they waited there like fabled monsters of Arab story ready for the magician's touch, tractable, reckless, will-less--organized lifelessness full of a strange semblance of life.
The Marches admired the impressive sight with a thrill of patriotic pride in the fact that the whole world perhaps could not afford just the like.

Then they hurried down to the ticket-offices, and he got her a lower berth in the Boston sleeper, and went with her to the car.

They made the most of the fact that her berth was in the very middle of the car; and she promised to write as soon as she reached home.

She promised also that, having seen the limitations of New York in respect to flats, she would not be hard on him if he took something not quite ideal.