“Irving, you—­you mustn’t.”

She pushed back from the table.  He paid his check with a hand that trembled, resuming, even as he crammed his bill-folder into a rear pocket: 

“Be a sport, Miriam!  I tell you we got the right to do it because we’re in love.  We’ll just tell them the truth, that at the last minute we—­we just couldn’t let go.  I’ll do the talking, Miriam; I’ll tell the old folks.”

“Ray she—­”

“If you ain’t afraid to start out on a hundred a month and commissions, dear, we don’t need to be scared of nothing.  I’ll tell them just the plain truth, dear.  Just think, if we do it now, when they come back in ten weeks we can be down at the pier to meet them, eh, Miriam, just like an—­an old married couple—­eh, Miriam—­eh, Miriam, dear!”

She rose.  A red seepage of blood flooded her face; her bosom rose and fell.

“Are you game, Miriam?  Are you, darling—­eh, Miriam, eh?”

“Yes, Irving.”

* * * * *

Alongside her pier, white as a gull, new painted, new washed, cargoed and stoked, the Roumania reared three red smoke-stacks, and sat proudly with the gang-plank flung out from her mighty hip and her nose tapering toward the blue harbor and the blue billows beyond.

Within the narrow confines of a first-deck stateroom, piled round with luggage and its double-decker berths freshly made up, Mrs. Binswanger applied an anxious eye to the port-hole, straining tiptoe for a wider glimpse of deck.

“I tell you this much, papa, in another five minutes when that child don’t come, right away off the boat I get and go home where I belong.”

In the act of browsing among the lower contents of his wicker hand-bag Mr. Binswanger raised a perspiring face.

“Na, na, mamma, thirty minutes’ time yet she’s got to get here.  Everybody don’t got to come on four hours too soon like us.”

“Ja, you should worry about anything, so long as you got right in front of you your newspapers and your tobacco.  Right away for his tobacco he has to dig when he sees so worried I am I can’t see.  Why don’t our Ray come back now if she can’t find ’em and say she can’t find ’em?”

“I tell you, Carrie, if you let me go myself I can find ’em and—­”

“Right here you stay with me, Simon Binswanger!  We don’t get separated no more as we can help.  I ain’t—­Ach, look such a crowd, and no Miriam.  I—­”

“Na, na, Carrie!”

“So easy-going he is!  My daughter should keep me worried like this!  To lunch the day what she sails to Europe she has to go!  Always she complains that salesmen ain’t good enough for her yet, and on the day she sails she has to go to lunch with one.  Why, I ask you, Simon, why don’t that Ray come back?”

Mr. Binswanger packed his pipe tight and adjusted a small, close-fitting black cap.  “To travel with women, I tell you, it ain’t no pleasure.”