Shall I tell you of Delilah?  She attracts much attention, with her gracious manner and her wonderful clothes.  All the people are crazy about her.  They think she is English, and a duchess at least.  Colin is as pleased as Punch at the success he has made of her, and he just stands aside and watches her, and flickers his pale lashes and smiles.  Last night she danced some of the new dances, and her tango is as stately as a minuet.  She and Porter danced together—­and everybody stopped to look at them.  The gossip is going the rounds that they are engaged.  Oh, I wish they were—­I wish they were!  It would be good for him to meet his match.  Delilah could hold her own; she wouldn’t let him insist and manage until she was positively mesmerized, as I am.  Delilah has such a queenly way of ruling her world.  All the men on board trail after her.  But she makes most of them worship from afar.  As for the women, she picks the best, instinctively, and the ice which seems congealed around the heart of the average Britisher melts before her charm, so that already she is playing bridge with the proper people, and having tea with the inner circle.  Even with these she seems to assume an air of remoteness, which seems to set her apart—­and it is this air, Grace says, which conquers.

When people aren’t coupling Porter’s name with Delilah’s, they are coupling it with Grace’s.  You should see our “red-headed woodpeckers,” as poor Barry used to call them.  When they promenade, Grace wears a bit of a black hat that shows all of her glorious hair, and Porter’s cap can’t hide his crown of glory.  At first people thought they were brother and sister, but since it is known that they aren’t I can see that everybody is puzzled.

It is all like a play passing in front of me.  There are charming English people—­charming Americans and some uncharming ones.  Oh, why don’t we, who began in such simplicity, try to remain a simple people?  It just seems to me sometimes as if everybody on board is trying to show off.  The rich ones are trying to display their money, and the intellectual ones their brains.  Is there any real difference between the new-rich and the new-cultured, Roger Poole?  One tells about her three motor cars, and the other tells about her three degrees.  It is all tiresome.  The world is a place to have things and to know things, but if the having them and knowing them makes them so important that you have to talk about them all the time there’s something wrong.

That’s the charm of Grace.  She has money and position—­and I’ve told you how she simply carried off all the honors at college; she paints wonderfully, and her opinions are all worth listening to.  But she doesn’t throw her knowledge at you.  She is interested in people, and puts books where they belong.  She is really the only one whom I welcome without any misgivings, except darling Aunt Isabelle.  The others when they come to talk to me, are either too sad or too energetic.