ou sat still you did not suffer.

In the prompt monotony the time was already passing swiftly. The
deck-steward seemed hardly to have been round with tea and bouillon, and
he had not yet gathered up all the empty cups, when the horn for lunch
sounded. It was the youngest of the table-stewards who gave the summons
to meals; and whenever the pretty boy appeared with his bugle, funny
passengers gathered round him to make him laugh, and stop him from
winding it. His part of the joke was to fulfill his duty with gravity,
and only to give way to a smile of triumph as he walked off.

XI.

At lunch, in the faded excitement of their first meeting, the people
at the Marches' table did not renew the premature intimacy of their
breakfast talk. Mrs. March went to lie down in her berth afterwards, and
March went on deck without her. He began to walk to and from the barrier
between the first and second cabin promenades; lingering near it, and
musing pensively, for some of the people beyond it looked as intelligent
and as socially acceptable, even to their clothes, as their pecuniary
betters of the saloon.

There were two women, a mother and daughter, whom he fancied to be
teachers, by their looks, going out for a little rest, or perhaps for
a little further study to fit them more perfectly for their work. They
gazed wistfully across at him whenever he came up to the barrier; and
he feigned a conversation with them and tried to convince them that the
stamp of inferiority which their poverty put upon them was just, or if
not just, then inevitable. He argued with them that the sort of barrier
which here prevented their being friends with him, if they wished it,
ran invisibly through society everywhere but he felt ashamed before
their kind, patient, intelligent faces, and found himself wishing to
excuse the fact he was defending. Was it any worse, he asked them, than
their not being invited to the entertainments of people in upper Fifth
Avenue? He made them own that if they were let across that barrier the
whole second cabin would have a logical right to follow; and they were
silenced. But they continued to gape at him with their sincere, gentle
eyes whenever he returned to the barrier in his walk, till he could bear
it no longer, and strolled off toward the steerage.

There was more reason why the passengers there should be penned into a
little space of their own in the sort of pit made by the narrowing deck
at the bow. They s