med to realize that she was Marcella Lashcairn, or, if
they realized it, it made no impression on them.

"Don't people here seem bad tempered?" said she to the doctor. "They
don't seem to care about each other in the least."

"There are so many of them, Marcella--at home, you see, there are so few
that they are frightfully interesting and friendly and critical of each
other. Among all these people nobody matters very much--"

"They matter to me. I want to be friends with them, take them under my
wing," she said, looking round at them, most of them people who would
not be very likely to be put under anyone's wing at all. "Don't you feel
like that?"

"I don't. They come under my wing fast enough without being asked and
lots of them come in the night just when I've got in bed," he said. "I'm
a bit tired of people, Marcella. I've seen too much of them. I always
get two views of 'em, you know--inside and out. And the inside view is
very depressing."

He laughed at her grave face, but once again he had a sharp misgiving
about letting her go away alone. It seemed dangerous to turn her,
practically an anchorite, loose among so many people. He wished, now,
that he had let her brave the freezings of the saloon rather than the
thawings of the steerage. But she seemed so confident, so eager, that he
could say nothing to damp her spirits, only he was very glad, on going
with her to look at her cabin, to find that she was to have it to
herself. That, at any rate, prevented a too close intimacy that he
suddenly felt might be dangerous.

They found very little to say during the twenty minutes he had to spend
with her before the tender took him back to the shore. He was feeling
very saddened, and at the same time anxious to give her excellent,
fatherly advice, for he suddenly realized her abysmal ignorance when he
saw her standing smiling with an air of pleased expectancy among all
these strangers, waiting, as she had said, to love them all and take
them all under her wing. Twice he started nervously to warn her--and
each time she interrupted him joyously.

"Doctor, just come and peep into this door! Look, millions and millions
of shiny rods and wheels and things. Oh aren't engines the most
beautiful things on earth? Look at them--not an inch to waste in them!
I wish I could be an engineer."

The next minute the first bell rang to warn visitors to be getting their
farewells over, and he started again, shyly and hesitatingly: