e casual experienced
glance, the touch of irony and of tolerance, how well I knew it and how
well I liked it! Dear old England, sitting in our wake, seemed to hold
by comparison a great many soft, unsophisticated people, immensely
occupied about very particular trifles. How difficult it had been, all
the summer, to be interested! These of my long acquaintance belonged to
my country's Executive, acute, alert, with the marks of travail on them.
Gladly I went in and out of the women's cabins and listened to the argot
of the men; my own ruling, administering, soldiering little lot.

Cecily looked at them askance. To her the atmosphere was alien, and I
perceived that gently and privately she registered objections. She
cast a disapproving eye upon the wife of a Conservator of Forests, who
scanned with interest a distant funnel and laid a small wager that it
belonged to the Messageries Maritimes. She looked with a straightened
lip at the crisply stepping women who walked the deck in short and
rather shabby skirts with their hands in their jacket-pockets
talking transfers and promotions; and having got up at six to make
a water-colour sketch of the sunrise, she came to me in profound
indignation to say that she had met a man in his pyjamas; no doubt; poor
wretch, on his way to be shaved. I was unable to convince her he was not
expected to visit the barber in all his clothes.

At the end of the third day she told me that she wished these people
wouldn't talk to her; she didn't like them. I had turned in the hour we
left the Channel and had not left my berth since, so possibly I was not
in the most amiable mood to receive a douche of cold water. 'I must try
to remember, dear,' I said, 'that you have been brought up altogether in
the society of pussies and vicars and elderly ladies, and of course you
miss them. But you must have a little patience. I shall be up tomorrow,
if this beastly sea continues to go down; and then we will try to find
somebody suitable to introduce to you.'

'Thank you, mamma,' said my daughter, without a ray of suspicion. Then
she added consideringly, 'Aunt Emma and Aunt Alice do seem quite elderly
ladies beside you, and yet you are older than either of them aren't you?
I wonder how that is.'

It was so innocent, so admirable, that I laughed at my own expense;
while Cecily, doing her hair, considered me gravely. 'I wish you would
tell me why you laugh, mamma,' quoth she; 'you laugh so often.'

We had n