d she dances half
naked before thousands of people every night! Can you beat it! The last
person in the world you'd think would care a whoop, and she turns out
to be as finicky about her legs as your grandmother. Women certainly are
queer."

With this profound comment on the inconsistency of the sex, he took
himself off in the direction of the Captain's quarters,--a forward cabin
which served in lieu of the dismantled bridge.

CHAPTER VII.

He saw but little of her during the next forty-eight hours. She
seemed to avoid him. At any other time and in other circumstances he
undoubtedly would have resented her indifference,--a very common and
natural masculine failing,--but in these strenuous hours he was too
fully occupied with the affairs of life and death. Once she stopped him
to inquire if Miss Clinton was still able to dress his wounds.

"Once a day," he replied. "She's even pluckier than you are, Madame
Obosky."

Her eyes narrowed. "Indeed?"

"Yes, because she believes we are going to die--every one of us. It
takes pluck to keep going when you've got that sort of thing to face,
doesn't it?"

Her gesture took in the dozen or more men within range of her vision.
"It should take no more pluck to keep a woman going than a man, my
friend. You do not call yourself plucky, do you? I do not call myself
plucky. On the contrary, I call myself a coward. I am afraid to stay in
my stateroom. I like to be out in the open like zis. One has to be very,
very brave, Mr. Percivail, to lie in one's bed all alone and think that
death is waiting just outside the thin little walls. Miss Clinton is
splendid, but she is not plucky. She is as I am: afraid of the darkness,
afraid to be alone, afraid to be where she cannot know and see all zat
is happening. She has a woman's courage, just as I have it,--if you
please. It is the courage that depends so much on the courage of others.
You think I am brave. I am brave because I am with trained, efficient
men. But if the Captain were to come to me now as I stand here, and say
zat the ship is to sink in ten minutes and that we all must go down with
her, would I face it bravely? No! I would throw myself down on the floor
and scream and pray and tear my hair. Why? Because the men had given up.
I am kept up by the courage of others. That is the courage of woman. She
must be supported in her pain, in her suffering, in her courage."

"Well, if you put it that way, there are very few m