e or information from March; then he said he
must go and try to get his Missus out; March understood him to mean
his wife, and he hurried down to his own, to whom he related his
hair-breadth escape from Burnamy.

"I don't call it an escape at all!" she declared. "I call it the
greatest possible misfortune. If it had been Burnamy we could have
brought them together at once, just when she has seen so clearly that
she was in the wrong, and is feeling all broken up. There wouldn't have
been any difficulty about his being in the second-cabin. We could have
contrived to have them meet somehow. If the worst came to the worst you
could have lent him money to pay the difference, and got him into the
first-cabin."

"I could have taken that six-hundred-dollar room for him," said March,
"and then he could have eaten with the swells."

She answered that now he was teasing; that he was fundamentally
incapable of taking anything seriously; and in the end he retired before
the stewardess bringing her first coffee, with a well-merited feeling
that if it had not been for his triviality the young Lancashireman would
really have been Burnamy.

LXXV.

Except for the first day and night out from Queenstown, when the ship
rolled and pitched with straining and squeaking noises, and a thumping
of the lifted screws, there was no rough weather, and at last the ocean
was livid and oily, with a long swell, on which she swayed with no
perceptible motion save from her machinery.

Most of the seamanship seemed to be done after dark, or in those early
hours when March found the stewards cleaning the stairs, and the
sailors scouring the promenades. He made little acquaintance with his
fellow-passengers. One morning he almost spoke with an old Quaker lady
whom he joined in looking at the Niagara flood which poured from the
churning screws; but he did not quite get the words out. On the contrary
he talked freely with an American who, bred horses on a farm near
Boulogne, and was going home to the Horse Show; he had been thirty-five
years out of the country, but he had preserved his Yankee accent in all
its purity, and was the most typical-looking American on board. Now and
then March walked up and down with a blond Mexican whom he found of the
usual well-ordered Latin intelligence, but rather flavorless; at times
he sat beside a nice Jew, who talked agreeably, but only about business;
and he philosophized the race as so tiresome often because