.

There Ramsey had been born and had grown up, knowing the great
Mississippi only as a remote realm of poetry and adventure out of which
at intervals her mighty father came to clasp to his broad breast her
sweet, glad mother, tarry a few days or hours, and be gone again. She,
herself, had seldom seen it even from the Natchez bluffs, yet she could
name all its chief boats apart, not by sight but by the long, soft
bellow of their steam-whistles, wafted inland. But now, at last, she was
a passenger on its waters. As Hugh, so well grown up as to breadth and
gravity, took his seat at the head of the dazzling board that filled the
whole middle third of the cabin, and as she sat down next him with all
the other adolescents and juveniles in places of inferior dignity, the
affair seemed the most significant as well as most brilliant in which
she had ever taken part.

Most significant, because to love the river for itself would be to find
herself easily and lastingly first in her father's love and favor--her
only wish in this world. And most brilliant: without an angle or
partition the cabin extended between the two parallel lines of
staterooms running aft through the boat's entire length from boiler deck
to stern guards. Its richly carpeted floor gently dipped amidships and
as gently rose again to the far end, where you might see the sofas and
piano of that undivided part sanctified to the ladies. Its whole course
was dazzlingly lighted with chandeliers of gold bronze and crystal that
forever quivered, glittered, and tinkled to the tremor of the boat's
swift advance. It was multitudinously pilastered, gleamingly
white-painted and shellacked, profusely gilded and pictorially panelled,
and it bewilderingly reflected itself and Ramsey from mirrors wide or
narrow wherever mirrors wide or narrow could be set in.

A new decorum came into her bearing. She ceased to ask questions. She
waited for them to be put to her--from the head of the table--and smiled
where an hour earlier she would have laughed. Above all, she felt in her
spirit the same dreamy strangeness she had so lately felt in her bodily
frame when the boat first began to move: a feeling as if the young
company about her were but stayers behind on a shore from which she was
beginning to be inexorably borne away. The wide river of a world's life,
to which the rillet of her own small existence had been carelessly
winding, was all at once clearly in sight. She could almost ha