“Come, Miss Lamarque,” I interrupted.  “I must not hear another word.  ‘Macbeth doth murder sleep,’ and I shall be nervous for a month after this.  So, good-night, Mr. Garth, and be sure you merit your first name by taking good care of us while we imitate the example of your worthy captain and ‘swing ourselves to sleep,’ or rather let the waves perform that office for us.  I shall make it my care to-morrow morning early, if you still hold the helm, to show you my sketch, and convince you that it was never made for fun at all, but that it is a real portrait of a very fine-looking seaman, a real viking in appearance, and somewhat better than one at heart, I trust.  I shall hope to earn your good opinion instead of ill-will, when you have only seen my sketch.”

“You have it already, you have it already, young gal—­young miss, I mean,” he said, with a wave of the hand, which meant to be courteous, no doubt, but seemed only defiant.  “An’ this much I kin say without injury to Sall—­that I’d rather hear you talk and see you smile, as I has been watchin’ of you constant do to-day, than go to the circus in New York, or even to a Spanish bull-fight, or hear a Fourth-of-July oration, or ‘tend camp-meetin’—­and that’s saying no little—­an’ no iceberg shall come near you while Christian Garth lays a hand upon this helm.  But don’t be skeered, ladies; no harm will come to the good ship Kosciusko.”

“I declare our pilot is quite chivalrous, as far as you are concerned, for I marked his glance, Miss Harz,” said Miss Lamarque, archly, as we turned our faces cabinward, under the protection of our helmsman’s promised vigilance.  “See what it is to be young and pretty, and remark the truth of the old proverb, as exemplified in his case, that ’extremes meet.’  Victoria herself is not more independent of me or my position—­established facts as both are in the eyes of some—­than is Christian Garth.  To him, this outsider of the world of fashion, I am only a homely old woman; no prestige comes in to garnish the unvarnished fact—­a plain old maid, my dear—­with not even the remembrance of beauty as a consolation, nor its remnant as a sign of past triumphs, ’only this and nothing more,’ as that wonderful man Poe makes his raven say.  We never find our level until we go among people who know and care nothing about us, who have never ’heard of us’—­that exordium of most greetings from folks of our own class.  It is absolutely refreshing to be so unaffectedly despised and slighted—­it does one a world of good, there is no doubt of that, especially when one’s grandfather was a Revolutionary notability, and other antecedents of a piece—­but men are all alike at heart, only the worldly ones wear flimsy masks, you know, and pretend to adore intellect and ugliness, when beauty is the only thing they care for—­all a sham, my dear, in any case.”