“Oh!  Dove!  Wood-pigeon!  Of course he refused it.  He was bound to.  Owner of a two-hundred-and-fifty-ton yacht taking a remedy for sea-sickness in public on the two-hundred-and-fifty-ton yacht!  The very idea makes you shiver.  But he’ll take it down there.  And he won’t ask any questions.  And he’ll hide it from the doctor.  And he’ll pretend, and he’ll expect everybody else to pretend, that he’s never been within a mile of the stuff.”

“Tommy, I don’t believe you.”

“And he’s a lovely man, all the same.”

“Tommy, I don’t believe you.”

“Yes, you do.  You’d like not to, but you can’t help it.  I sometimes do bruise people badly in their organ of illusions-about-human-nature, but it is fun, after all, isn’t it?”

“What?”

“Getting down to the facts.”

Accompanied by the tattoo of her necklace, Miss Thompkins moved away in the direction of Madame Piriac, who was engaged with Musa.

“Admit I’m rather brilliant to-night,” she threw over her shoulder.

The dice seem to be always loaded in favour of the Misses Thompkins of society.  Less than a quarter of an hour later Doctor Cromarty, showing his head just above the level of the deck, called out: 

“Price, ye can wind up that box o’ yours.  Mr. Gilman is coming on deck.  He’s wonderful better.”

CHAPTER XXXII

BY THE BINNACLE

The owner was at the wheel.  But he had not got there at once.  This singular man, who strangely enough was wearing one of his most effulgent and heterogeneous club neckties, had begun by dancing.  He danced with all three ladies, one after the other; and he did not merely dance—­he danced modernly, he danced the new dances to the new tunes, given off like intoxicating gas from the latest of gramophones.  He knew how to hold the arm of a woman above her head, while coiling his own around it in the manner of a snake, and he knew how to make his very body a vast syncopation.  The effect of his arrival was as singular as himself.  Captain Wyatt, Doctor Cromarty and Mr. Price withdrew to that portion of the deck about the wheel which convention had always roped off for them with invisible ropes.  The captain, by custom, messed by himself, whereas the other two had their meals in the saloon, entering and leaving quickly and saying little while at table.  But apart from meals the three formed a separate clan on the yacht.  The indisposition of the owner had dissolved this clan into the general population of the saloon.  The recovery of the owner re-created it.  Mr. Price had suddenly begun to live arduously for the gramophone alone.  And when summoned by the owner to come and form half of the third couple for dancing, Doctor Cromarty had the air of arousing himself from a meditation upon medicine.  Also, the passengers themselves danced with conscientiousness, with elaborate gusto and with an earnest desire to reach a high standard.  And between dances everybody went up to Mr. Gilman and said how lovely it all was.  And it really was lovely.