ПЕРЕВОД НЕ НУЖЕН
Retell the text as if you were: - American Lady
The train passed very quickly a long, red-stonehouse with a garden and four thick palm trees with tables under them in the shade. On the other side was the sea, which was seen only occasionally and far below against the rocks.
"I bought him in Palermo,2" the American lady said. "We only had an hour and it was Sunday morning. The man wanted to be paid in dollars and I gave him a dollar and a half. He really sings very beautifully."
It was very hot in the train and it was very hot in the compartment. No breeze came through the open window. The American lady pulled the windowblind down and there was no more sea, even occasionally. On the other side there was glass, then the corridor, then trees and flat fields of grapes, with greystone hills behind them.
Coming into Marseilles3 the train slowed down and followed one track through many others into the station. The train stayedtwenty-fiveminutes in the station at Marseilles and the American lady bought a copy of the Daily Mail4. She walked a little way along the station platform, but she stayed near the steps of the car because at Cannes,5 where it stopped for twelve minutes, the train had left with no signal of departure and she had only gotten6 on just in time. The American lady was a little deaf and she was afraid that perhaps signals of departure were given and that she did not hear them.
After it was dark the train was in Avignon.7 People got on and off. At thenews-standFrenchmen, returning to Paris, bought that day's French papers.
Inside the compartment the porter had pulled down the three beds from inside the wall and prepared them for sleeping. In the night the American lady lay without sleeping because the train was a rapide8 and went very fast and she was afraid of the speed in the night. The
American lady's bed was the one next to the window. The canary from Palermo, a cloth spread over his cage, was cut of the draught in the corridor that went into the compartment washroom. There was a blue light outside the compartment, and all night the train went fast and the American lady lay awake and waited for a wreck.
In the morning the train was near Paris, and after the American lady had come out of the washroom, looking very wholesome and middle-agedand American in spite of not having slept, and had taken the cloth off the bird cage
and hung the cage in the sun, she went to the restaurant car lor breakfast. When she came back to the compartment again, the beds had been pushed back into the wall and made into seats, the canary was shaking his feathers in the sunlight that came through the open window, and the train was much nearer Paris.
"He loves the sun," the American lady said. "He'll sing now in a little while. I've always loved birds. I'm taking him home to my little girl. There — he's singing now."
The train crossed a river and passed through a very beautifully tended forest. The train passed through many outside of Paris towns. There were tramcars in the towns and big advertisements en the walls toward the train. For several minutes I had not listened to the American lady, who was talking to my wife.
"Is your husband American too?" asked the lady. "Yes," said my wife. "We're both Americans." "I thought you were English."
"Oh, no."
"I'm so glad you're Americans. American men make the best husbands," the American lady was saying. "That was why we left the Continent,9 you know. My daughter fell in love with a man in Vevey.10" She stopped. "They were simply madly in love." She stopped again. "I took her away, of course."
"Did she get over it?" asked my wife.
"I don't think so," said the American lady. "She wouldn't eat anything and she doesn't seem to take an interest in anything. She doesn't care about things. I couldn't have her marrying a foreigner."" She paused. "Someone, a very good friend, told me once, "No foreigner can make an American girl a good husband."
"No," said my wife, "I suppose not."
The train was now coming into Paris. There were many cars standing on tracks — brown wooden restaurant cars and brown wooden sleeping cars that would go to Italy at five o'clock that night; the cars were marked Paris—Rome,and cars, with seats on the roofs, that went back and forth to the suburbs with, at certain hours, people in all the seats and on the roofs.
"Americans make the best husbands," the American lady said to my wife. I was getting down the bags. "American men are the only men in the world to marry."
"How long ago did you leave Vevey?" asked my wife.
"Two years ago this fall.12 It's her,'you know, that I'm taking the canary to." "Was the man your daughter was in love with a Swiss?"13
"Yes," said the American lady. "He was from a very good family in Vevey. He was going to be an engineer. They met there in Vevey. They used to go for long walks together."