He wore flannel trousers that needed pressing, a dark jacket that slacked over his slight body and showed faintly purple where the light struck it, and a tomatocolored woolen tie, carelessly knotted. The rise of hair and the slope of his long nose gave him a look of intense purpose and somehow of forward motion, though from the front, his heavy, horizontal brows and mouth imposed a stillness and reserve. In the reflection the dusk had started to create in the window's glass, the peak of white collar along his jaw suggested a style of the last century, like his black hair that grew high and loose on top and lay close in back. A tab of his soft shirt collar began to ride up. Again and again his brown eyes dropped to the stubborn, fascinating ground out the window. The cigarette replaced the match inside his hand, and he smoked in slow, steady pulls. He tapped it twice on the face of his wristwatch, read the time, 5:12, as if it meant anything today, and fitted the cigarette into the corner of his mouth before he brought the cupped match up. Automatically, he reached for a cigarette, remembered for the tenth time that he couldn't smoke in the Pullman car, then took one anyway. He could sense Miriam ahead of him, not much farther now, pink and tan-freckled, and radiating a kind of unhealthful heat, like the prairie out the window. Would there really ever be a divorce from her? Hate had begun to paralyze his thinking, he realized, to make little blind alleys of the roads that logic had pointed out to him in New York. She might not even want a divorce, only money. Miriam would delay the divorce at best, he thought. Guy took his eyes from the window and hitched himself back against the seat. The faster the train went, the more buoyant and taunting the undulations. The prairie only undulated, like a vast, pink-tan blanket being casually shaken. It was having to stop at smaller and more frequent stations, where it would wait impatiently for a moment, then attack the prairie again. One The train tore along with an angry, irregular rhythm.
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