vised. She was absorbed in Agatha, but
in her liberation from her hypochondria, she began also to make a
comparative study of the American swells, in the light of her late
experience with the German highhotes. It is true that none of the
swells gave her the opportunity of examining them at close range, as the
highhotes had done. They kept to their state-rooms mostly, where, after
he thought she could bear it, March told her how near he had come to
making her their equal by an outlay of six hundred dollars. She now
shuddered at the thought; but she contended that in their magnificent
exclusiveness they could give points to European princes; and that this
showed again how when Americans did try to do a thing, they beat the
world. Agatha Triscoe knew who they were, but she did not know them;
they belonged to another kind of set; she spoke of them as "rich
people," and she seemed content to keep away from them with Mrs.
March and with the shy, silent old wife of Major Eltwin, to whom March
sometimes found her talking.

He never found her father talking with Major Eltwin. General Triscoe had
his own friends in the smoking-room, where he held forth in a certain
corner on the chances of the approaching election in New York, and
mocked their incredulity when he prophesied the success of Tammany and
the return of the King. March himself much preferred Major Eltwin to the
general and his friends; he lived back in the talk of the Ohioan into
his own younger years in Indiana, and he was amused and touched to find
how much the mid-Western life seemed still the same as he had known. The
conditions had changed, but not so much as they had changed in the East
and the farther West. The picture that the major drew of them in his
own region was alluring; it made March homesick; though he knew that
he should never go back to his native section. There was the comfort
of kind in the major; and he had a vein of philosophy, spare but sweet,
which March liked; he liked also the meekness which had come through
sorrow upon a spirit which had once been proud.

They had both the elderly man's habit of early rising, and they usually
found themselves together waiting impatiently for the cup of coffee,
ingenuously bad, which they served on the Cupania not earlier than half
past six, in strict observance of a rule of the line discouraging to
people of their habits. March admired the vileness of the decoction,
which he said could not be got anywhere ou