" Annie had
responded, with her quiet smile. "See if that fits you!"

They had been up in Mrs. von Behrens's big bedroom, where that lady was
looking at a newly arrived box of gowns. "That" was the frail,
embroidered coat of what Norma thought the prettiest linen suit she had
ever seen.

"It's charming on you, you little slender thing," Annie had said. "The
skirt will be too long; will you pin it, Keating? And see that it goes
at once to my mother's house."

Keating had pinned, admired. And Norma, turning herself before the
mirror, with her eyes shy with pleasure and gratitude, had known that
she was gaining ground.

So they had started radiantly on the cruise. But after the first few
miraculous hours of gliding along beneath the gay awnings that had all
been almost astonishingly disappointing, too. Caroline, to begin with,
was a dreadful weight upon her young guest. Caroline for breakfast,
luncheon, and dinner; Caroline retiring and rising, became almost
hateful. Caroline always wanted to do something, when Norma could have
dreamed and idled in her deck chair by the hour. It must be deck golf or
deck tennis, or they must go up and tease dignified and courteous
Captain Burns, "because he was such an old duck," or they must harass
one or two of the older people into bridge. Norma did not play bridge
well, and she hated it, and hated Caroline's way of paying for her
losses almost more than paying them herself.

Norma could not lie lazily with her book, raising her eyes to the
exquisite beauty of the slowly tipping sea, revelling in coolness and
airiness, because Caroline, fussing beside her, had never read a book
through in her life. The guest did not know, even now, that Caroline had
been a mental problem for years, that Caroline's family had consulted
great psycho-analysts about her, and had watched the girl's
self-centredness, her odd slyness, her hysteric emotions, with deep
concern. She did not know, even now, that the Cragies were anxious to
encourage this first reaching out, in Caroline, toward a member of her
own sex, and that her fancies for members of the opposite sex--for
severely indifferent teachers, for shocked and unresponsive
chauffeurs--were among the family problems, a part of the girl's
unfortunate under-development. Caroline's family was innocently
surprised to realize that her mind had not developed under the care of
maids who were absorbed in their own affairs, and foreigners who would
not hav