The bachelor at the head of the table broke the spell.  “I’m glad it didn’t begin with the Little Neck clams!”

“Probably they only let those people come for the dessert,” March suggested.

The widow now followed the direction of the other eyes; and looked up over her shoulder; she gave a little cry, and shrank down.  The young bride made her petted mouth, in appeal to the company; her husband looked severe, as if he were going to do something, but refrained, not to make a scene.  The reticent father threw one of his staccato glances at the port, and Mrs. March was sure that she saw the daughter steal a look at Burnamy.

The young fellow laughed.  “I don’t suppose there’s anything to be done about it, unless we pass out a plate.”

Mr. Kenby shook his head.  “It wouldn’t do.  We might send for the captain.  Or the chief steward.”

The faces at the port vanished.  At other ports profiles passed and repassed, as if the steerage passengers had their promenade under them, but they paused no more.

The Marches went up to their steamer chairs, and from her exasperated nerves Mrs. March denounced the arrangement of the ship which had made such a cruel thing possible.

“Oh,” he mocked, “they had probably had a good substantial meal of their own, and the scene of our banquet was of the quality of a picture, a purely aesthetic treat.  But supposing it wasn’t, we’re doing something like it every day and every moment of our lives.  The Norumbia is a piece of the whole world’s civilization set afloat, and passing from shore to shore with unchanged classes, and conditions.  A ship’s merely a small stage, where we’re brought to close quarters with the daily drama of humanity.”

“Well, then,” she protested, “I don’t like being brought to close quarters with the daily drama of humanity, as you call it.  And I don’t believe that the large English ships are built so that the steerage passengers can stare in at the saloon windows while one is eating; and I’m sorry we came on the Norumbia.”

“Ah, you think the Norumbia doesn’t hide anything,” he began, and he was going to speak of the men in the furnace pits of the steamer, how they fed the fires in a welding heat, and as if they had perished in it crept out on the forecastle like blanched phantasms of toil; but she interposed in time.

“If there’s anything worse, for pity’s sake don’t tell me,” she entreated, and he forebore.

He sat thinking how once the world had not seemed to have even death in it, and then how as he had grown older death had come into it more and more, and suffering was lurking everywhere, and could hardly be kept out of sight.  He wondered if that young Burnamy now saw the world as he used to see it, a place for making verse and making love, and full of beauty of all kinds waiting to be fitted with phrases.  He had lived a happy life; Burnamy would be lucky if he should live one half as happy; and yet if he could show him his whole happy life, just as it had truly been, must not the young man shrink from such a picture of his future?