Cathedral

In the waiting room of a train station, Miss Dent thinks about how she just threatened a man with a gun for hurting her. After she told the terrified man what she needed him to hear, she used her foot to shove his face into the dirt and walked to the train station with the gun in her purse. It is late, the ticket desk is no longer open, and Miss Dent is alone in the room. An older couple enters, seemingly annoyed that there is someone already in the waiting room as they “gave off an air of agitation of having just left somewhere in a great hurry and not yet being able to find a way to talk about it” (136). The man has no shoes, and Miss Dent surmises that they may also be drunk. The man greets Miss Dent as if everything is normal, and the woman gives her a look of disdain.

The woman speaks rapidly in a foreign language that sounds like Italian, but the man tells her to speak more slowly and in English. The woman complains about the “bunch of nuts” (137) at the gathering they just left, expressing pity for someone she refers to as “that girl” (137) and disdain for “that imbecile they call Captain Nick” (137).