eward-bound after modest European honeymoons,
were plainly scum to her, and it gave her ardent joy to see that most
of them were hurt when she impressed this on them mercilessly. It was
safer for her son to talk about the interesting German couple to the
second officer than it was for him to talk about them to his mother,
but, lo! youth knows not wisdom.

"Mother," he suggested upon the sixth day out, "I want to have you
come and see a fascinating couple on the steerage-deck."

"Another bride and groom?" she asked, in a bored voice. Brides and
grooms had come to be monotonous. She had seen all sorts since she had
started on this journey and now loathed the thought of newly married
fellow-creatures. She could not understand why John's interest had
been maintained in them.

He laughed. "No, not a bride and groom. The man is an old German,
handsome and refined, evidently out of place upon the steerage-deck,
the girl--she--why, mother, she's a peach. _She'd_ be out of place
'most anywhere but on a throne!"

"How very vulgar, John," his mother answered with that cold assumption
of superiority which had come to her with money. "I cannot see how
even you can link the steerage-deck with thrones. Princesses do not
travel steerage except between the covers of cheap books."

He laughed again. John Vanderlyn was clean and healthy-souled. He did
not always take his mother (whom he idolized) too seriously.

"I didn't say she was a princess," he replied, "but she might well be.
It was, however, rather the old man than the girl, though she is very
beautiful and quite as much misplaced upon the steerage-deck as he is,
that I wished to have you see." He was, it will be noted, learning
something of diplomacy. "He has a magnificent old face--the face of a
fine nature which has suffered terribly. I have seen him as he stood
at the ship's rail, astern, watching the white wake as if every
bubble on it was a marker on a tragic path. It is as if all he loved
on earth except the girl--you ought to see him look at her!--lies at
the far end of that frothy, watery trail."

"You become almost poetic!" she said without enthusiasm.

But, a day afterwards, she went with him and looked down at the
steerage passengers, singling out the pair he meant without the
slightest difficulty.

"What a distinguished-looking man he is!" said she, involuntarily.

"Isn't he?" said her delighted son.

The daughter was not on the deck, just then, and young