drop myself into one of those muddy rivers, or turn on the gas in one of those dirty hotel rooms, I don’t know to this day.  At twenty-two you must hope for something more than to be able to bury your husband decently, and what I hoped for was to make my family happy.  It was the same afterward in Germany.  A young woman must live for human people.  Horace wasn’t enough.  I might have had lovers, of course.  I suppose you will say it would have been better if I had.”

Though there seemed no need for me to say anything, I murmured that I thought there were more likely to be limits to the rapacity of a lover than to that of a discontented and envious family.

“Well,” Cressida gathered herself up, “once I got out from under it all, didn’t I?  And perhaps, in a milder way, such a release can come again.  You were the first person I told when I ran away with Charley, and for a long while you were the only one who knew about Blasius Bouchalka.  That time, at least, I shook the Garnets.  I wasn’t distracted or empty.  That time I was all there!”

“Yes,” I echoed her, “that time you were all there.  It’s the greatest possible satisfaction to remember it.”

“But even that,” she sighed, “was nothing but lawyers and accounts in the end—­and a hurt.  A hurt that has lasted.  I wonder what is the matter with me?”

The matter with Cressida was, that more than any woman I have ever known, she appealed to the acquisitive instinct in men; but this was not easily said, even in the brutal frankness of a long friendship.

We would probably have gone further into the Bouchalka chapter of her life, had not Horace appeared and nervously asked us if we did not wish to take a turn before we went inside.  I pleaded indolence, but Cressida rose and disappeared with him.  Later I came upon them, standing at the stern above the huddled steerage deck, which was by this time bathed in moonlight, under an almost clear sky.  Down there on the silvery floor, little hillocks were scattered about under quilts and shawls; family units, presumably,—­male, female, and young.  Here and there a black shawl sat alone, nodding.  They crouched submissively under the moonlight as if it were a spell.  In one of those hillocks a baby was crying, but the sound was faint and thin, a slender protest which aroused no response.  Everything was so still that I could hear snatches of the low talk between my friends.  Cressida’s voice was deep and entreating.  She was remonstrating with Horace about his losses at bridge, begging him to keep away from the cardroom.

“But what else is there to do on a trip like this, my Lady?” he expostulated, tossing his spark of a cigarette-end overboard.  “What is there, now, to do?”

“Oh, Horace!” she murmured, “how can you be so?  If I were twenty-two, and a boy, with some one to back me—­”

Horace drew his shoulders together and buttoned his top-coat.  “Oh, I’ve not your energy, Mother dear.  We make no secret of that.  I am as I am.  I didn’t ask to be born into this charming world.”