s;
their assiduous guardian, or whatever he was, feeding them on deck with
the care of a mother-bird for its fledglings, so that nobody except the
two German ladies in their cabin had seen them without the caps. The
young men put them down as half-grown only, somewhere about fourteen
they thought, and nothing but what, if they were boys instead of girls,
would have been called louts.

Still, a ship is a ship, and it is wonderful what can be managed in the
way of dalliance if one is shut up on one long enough; and the Misses
Twinkler, in spite of their loutishness, their apparent baldness, and
their constant round-eyed solemnity, would no doubt have been the
objects of advances before New York was reached if it hadn't been for
Mr. Twist. There wasn't a girl under forty in the second class on that
voyage, the young men resentfully pointed out to each other, except
these two kids who were too much under it, and a young lady of thirty
who sat manicuring her nails most of the day with her back supported by
a life-boat, and polishing them with red stuff till they flashed rosily
in the sun. This young lady was avoided for the first two days, while
the young men still remembered their mothers, because of what she looked
like; but was greatly loved for the rest of the voyage precisely for
that reason.

Still, every one couldn't get near her. She was only one; and there
were at least a dozen active, cooped-up young men taking lithe,
imprisoned exercise in long, swift steps up and down the deck, ready for
any sort of enterprise, bursting with energy and sea-air and spirits. So
that at last the left-overs, those of the young men the lady of the rosy
nails was less kind to, actually in their despair attempted ghastly
flirtations with the two German ladies. They approached them with a kind
of angry amorousness. They tucked them up roughly in rugs. They brought
them cushions as though they were curses. And it was through this
_rapprochement_, in the icy warmth of which the German ladies expanded
like bulky flowers and grew at least ten years younger, the ten years
they shed being their most respectable ones, that the ship became aware
of the nationality of the Misses Twinkler.

The German ladies were not really German, as they explained directly
there were no more submarines about, for a good woman, they said,
becomes automatically merged into her husband, and they, therefore, were
merged into Americans, both of them, and as loyal