Then they went “downstairs,” as Audrey said; but Mr. Gilman corrected her and said “below,” whereupon Audrey retorted that she should call it the “ground floor,” and Mr. Gilman laughed as she had never heard a man of his age laugh.  The sight of the ground floor still further increased Audrey’s notion of the dimensions of the yacht, whose corridors and compartments appeared to stretch away endlessly in two directions.  At the foot of the curving staircase Mr. Gilman, pulling aside a curtain, announced:  “This is the saloon.”  When she heard the word Audrey expected a poky cubicle, but found a vast drawing-room with more books than she had ever seen in any other drawing-room, many pictures, an open piano, with music on it; sofas in every quarter, and about a thousand cupboards and drawers, each with a silver knob or handle.  Above all was a dome of multi-coloured glass, and exactly beneath the dome a table set for supper, with the finest napery, cutlery and crystal.  The apartment was dazzlingly lighted, and yet not a single lamp could be detected in the act of illumination.  A real parlourmaid suddenly appeared at the far end of the room, and behind her two stewards in gilt-buttoned white Eton jackets and black trousers.  Mr. Gilman, with seriousness, bade the parlourmaid take charge of the ladies and show them the sleeping-cabins.

“Choose any cabins you like,” said he, as Madame Piriac and Audrey rustled off.

There might have been hundreds of sleeping-cabins.  And there did, in fact, appear to be quite a number of them, to say nothing of two bathrooms.  They inspected all of them save one, which was locked.  In an awed voice the parlourmaid said, “That is the owner’s cabin.”  At another door she said, in a different, disdainful voice, “That only leads to the galley and the crew’s quarters.”  Audrey wondered what a galley could be, and the mystery of that name, and the mystery of the two closed doors, merely made the whole yacht perfect.  The sleeping-cabins surpassed all else—­they were so compact, so complex, so utterly complete.  No large bedchamber, within Audrey’s knowledge, held so much apparatus, and offered so much comfort and so much wardrobe room as even the least of these cabins.  It was impossible, to be sure, that in one’s amused researches one had not missed a cupboard ingeniously disguised somewhere.  And the multiplicity of mirrors, and the message of the laconic monosyllable “Hot” on silver taps, and the discretion of the lighting, all indicated that the architect and creator of these marvellous microcosms had “understood.”  The cosy virtue of littleness, and the entire absurdity of space for the sake of space, were strikingly proved, and the demonstration amounted, in Audrey’s mind, to a new and delicious discovery.

The largest of the cabins had two berths at right angles to one another, each a lovely little bed with a running screen of cashmere.  Having admired it once, they returned to it.