two fiddlers and a flute player had been procured, who formed the band.  At sea you have always to look for your musicians among the second-class passengers.  And now under the awning young and old were standing up, and making themselves happy beneath the starlight and the glimmer of the dozen ship-lamps which had been hung around.  On board ship there are many sources of joy of which the land knows nothing.  You may flirt and dance at sixty; and if you are awkward in the turn of a valse, you may put it down to the motion of the ship.  You need wear no gloves, and may drink your soda-and-brandy without being ashamed of it.

It was not for John Caldigate to join the mazes of that dance, though he would have liked it well, and was well fitted by skill and taste for such exercise.  But the ground was hallowed on which they trod, and forbidden to him; and though there was probably not a girl or a dancing married woman there who would not have been proud to stand up with Mr. Caldigate of Folking, there was not one who would have dared to take the hand of a second-class passenger.  So he stood, just within his own boundary, and looked and longed.  Then there was a voice in his ear.  ’Do you dance, Mr. Caldigate?’

It was a very pleasant voice, low, but distinct and silvery, infinitely better again than the gown; a voice so distinct and well-managed that it would have been noticed for its peculiar sweetness if coming from any high-bred lady.  He turned round and found her face close to his.  Why had she come to speak to him when she must have perceived that he had intentionally avoided her.

‘I used to be very fond of dancing,’ he said, ’but it is one of the things that have gone away.’

’I, too, was fond of dancing; but, as you say, it has gone away.  It will come back to you, in half-a-dozen years, perhaps.  It can never come back to me.  Things do come back to men.’

‘Why more than to women?’

’You have a resurrection;—­I mean here upon earth.  We never have.  Though we live as long as you, the pleasure-seeking years of our lives are much shorter.  We burst out into full flowering early in our spring, but long before the summer is over, we are no more than huddled leaves and thick stalks.’

‘Are you a thick stalk, Mrs. Smith?’

’Unfortunately, not.  My flowers are gone while my stalk is still thin and sensitive.  And then women can’t recuperate.’

‘I don’t quite know what that means.’

’Yes, you do.  It is good English enough even for Cambridge by this time.  If you had made a false step, got into debt and ran away, or mistaken another man’s wife for your own, or disappeared altogether under a cloud for a while, you could retrieve your honour, and, sinking at twenty-five or thirty, could come up from out of the waters at thirty-five as capable of enjoyment and almost as fresh as ever.  But a woman does not bear submersion.  She is draggled ever afterwards.  She must hide everything by a life of lies, or she will get no admittance anywhere.  The man is rather the better liked because he has sown his wild oats broadly.  Of all these ladies dancing there, which dances the best?  There is not one who really knows how to dance.’