sky. I had never liked the sea so much before, indeed I had
never liked it at all; but now I had a revelation of how, in a midsummer
mood, it could please. It was darkly and magnificently blue and
imperturbably quiet--save for the great regular swell of its
heart-beats, the pulse of its life, and there grew to be something so
agreeable in the sense of floating there in infinite isolation and
leisure that it was a positive satisfaction the _Patagonia_ was not a
racer. One had never thought of the sea as the great place of safety,
but now it came over one that there is no place so safe from the land.
When it does not give you trouble it takes it away--takes away letters
and telegrams and newspapers and visits and duties and efforts, all the
complications, all the superfluities and superstitions that we have
stuffed into our terrene life. The simple absence of the post, when the
particular conditions enable you to enjoy the great fact by which it is
produced, becomes in itself a kind of bliss, and the clean stage of the
deck shows you a play that amuses, the personal drama of the voyage, the
movement and interaction, in the strong sea-light, of figures that end
by representing something--something moreover of which the interest is
never, even in its keenness, too great to suffer you to go to sleep. I,
at any rate, dozed a great deal, lying on my rug with a French novel,
and when I opened my eyes I generally saw Jasper Nettlepoint passing
with his mother's _protegee_ on his arm. Somehow at these moments,
between sleeping and waking, I had an inconsequent sense that they were
a part of the French novel. Perhaps this was because I had fallen into
the trick, at the start, of regarding Grace Mavis almost as a married
woman, which, as every one knows, is the necessary status of the heroine
of such a work. Every revolution of our engine at any rate would
contribute to the effect of making her one.

In the saloon, at meals, my neighbour on the right was a certain little
Mrs. Peck, a very short and very round person whose head was enveloped
in a 'cloud' (a cloud of dirty white wool) and who promptly let me know
that she was going to Europe for the education of her children. I had
already perceived (an hour after we left the dock) that some energetic
step was required in their interest, but as we were not in Europe yet
the business could not be said to have begun. The four little Pecks, in
the enjoyment of untrammelled leisure, swar