s. Leffers; the mother and her
son were Mrs. Adding and Mr. Roswell Adding; the young man who came in
last was Mr. L. J. Burnamy. March carried the list, with these names
carefully checked and rearranged on a neat plan of the table, to his
wife in her steamer chair, and left her to make out the history and
the character of the people from it. In this sort of conjecture long
experience had taught him his futility, and he strolled up and down and
looked at the life about him with no wish to penetrate it deeply.

Long Island was now a low yellow line on the left. Some fishing-boats
flickered off the shore; they met a few sail, and left more behind;
but already, and so near one of the greatest ports of the world, the
spacious solitude of the ocean was beginning. There was no swell; the
sea lay quite flat, with a fine mesh of wrinkles on its surface, and the
sun flamed down upon it from a sky without a cloud. With the light fair
wind, there was no resistance in the sultry air, the thin, dun smoke
from the smoke-stack fell about the decks like a stifling veil.

The promenades, were as uncomfortably crowded as the sidewalk of
Fourteenth Street on a summer's day, and showed much the social average
of a New York shopping thoroughfare. Distinction is something that does
not always reveal itself at first sight on land, and at sea it is still
more retrusive. A certain democracy of looks and clothes was the most
notable thing to March in the apathetic groups and detached figures. His
criticism disabled the saloon passengers of even so much personal appeal
as he imagined in some of the second-cabin passengers whom he saw across
their barrier; they had at least the pathos of their exclusion, and
he could wonder if they felt it or envied him. At Hoboken he had seen
certain people coming on board who looked like swells; but they had
now either retired from the crowd, or they had already conformed to the
prevailing type. It was very well as a type; he was of it himself; but
he wished that beauty as well as distinction had not been so lost in it.

In fact, he no longer saw so much beauty anywhere as he once did. It
might be that he saw life more truly than when he was young, and that
his glasses were better than his eyes had been; but there were analogies
that forbade his thinking so, and he sometimes had his misgivings that
the trouble was with his glasses. He made what he could of a pretty girl
who had the air of not meaning to lose a