lunch, and she was up later after
dinner than he could have advised. She was absorbed in Agatha, but in her
liberation from her hypochondria, she began also to make a comparative
study of the American swells, in the light of her late experience with
the German highhotes. It is true that none of the swells gave her the
opportunity of examining them at close range, as the highhotes had done.
They kept to their state-rooms mostly, where, after he thought she could
bear it, March told her how near he had come to making her their equal by
an outlay of six hundred dollars. She now shuddered at the thought; but
she contended that in their magnificent exclusiveness they could give
points to European princes; and that this showed again how when Americans
did try to do a thing, they beat the world. Agatha Triscoe knew who they
were, but she did not know them; they belonged to another kind of set;
she spoke of them as "rich people," and she seemed content to keep away
from them with Mrs. March and with the shy, silent old wife of Major
Eltwin, to whom March sometimes found her talking.

He never found her father talking with Major Eltwin. General Triscoe had
his own friends in the smoking-room, where he held forth in a certain
corner on the chances of the approaching election in New York, and mocked
their incredulity when he prophesied the success of Tammany and the
return of the King. March himself much preferred Major Eltwin to the
general and his friends; he lived back in the talk of the Ohioan into his
own younger years in Indiana, and he was amused and touched to find how
much the mid-Western life seemed still the same as he had known. The
conditions had changed, but not so much as they had changed in the East
and the farther West. The picture that the major drew of them in his own
region was alluring; it made March homesick; though he knew that he
should never go back to his native section. There was the comfort of kind
in the major; and he had a vein of philosophy, spare but sweet, which
March liked; he liked also the meekness which had come through sorrow
upon a spirit which had once been proud.

They had both the elderly man's habit of early rising, and they usually
found themselves together waiting impatiently for the cup of coffee,
ingenuously bad, which they served on the Cupania not earlier than half
past six, in strict observance of a rule of the line discouraging to
people of their habits. March admired the vilenes