ung men
were mainly of the smoking-room sort; they seldom risked themselves
among the steamer chairs. It was gayer in the second cabin, and gayer
yet in the steerage, where robuster emotions were operated by the
accordion. The passengers there danced to its music; they sang to it
and laughed to it unabashed under the eyes of the first-cabin witnesses
clustered along the rail above the pit where they took their rude
pleasures.

With March it came to his spending many hours of each long, swift day in
his berth with a book under the convenient electric light. He was safe
there from the acquaintances which constantly formed themselves only
to fall into disintegration, and cling to him afterwards as inorganic
particles of weather-guessing, and smoking-room gossip about the ship's
run.

In the earliest hours of the voyage he thought that he saw some faces
of the great world, the world of wealth and fashion; but these afterward
vanished, and left him to wonder where they hid themselves. He did not
meet them even in going to and from his meals; he could only imagine
them served in those palatial state-rooms whose interiors the stewards
now and then rather obtruded upon the public. There were people whom he
encountered in the promenades when he got up for the sunrise, and whom
he never saw at other times; at midnight he met men prowling in the dark
whom he never met by day. But none of these were people of the great
world. Before six o'clock they were sometimes second-cabin passengers,
whose barrier was then lifted for a little while to give them the
freedom of the saloon promenade.

From time to time he thought he would look up his Ohioan, and revive
from a closer study of him his interest in the rare American who had
never been to Europe. But he kept with his elderly wife, who had the
effect of withholding him from March's advances. Young Mr. and Mrs.
Leffers threw off more and more their disguise of a long-married pair,
and became frankly bride and groom. They seldom talked with any one
else, except at table; they walked up and down together, smiling into
each others faces; they sat side by side in their steamer chairs; one
shawl covered them both, and there was reason to believe that they were
holding each other's hands under it.

Mrs. Adding often took the chair beside Mrs. March when her husband was
straying about the ship or reading in his berth; and the two ladies must
have exchanged autobiographies, for Mrs. March