One of her maternal aunts made her a coming-out tea, after she left school; and she entered upon a series of dinners, dances, theatre parties, and receptions of all kinds; but the tide of fairy gold pouring through her fingers left no engagement-ring on them.  She had no duties, but she seldom got out of humor with her pleasures; she had some odd tastes of her own, and in a society where none but the most serious books were ever seriously mentioned she was rather fond of good ones, and had romantic ideas of a life that she vaguely called bohemian.  Her character was never tested by anything more trying than the fear that her father might take her abroad to live; he had taken her abroad several times for the summer.

The dreaded trial did not approach for several years after she had ceased to be a bud; and then it came when her father was again willing to serve his country in diplomacy, either at the Hague, or at Brussels, or even at Berne.  Reasons of political geography prevented his appointment anywhere, but General Triscoe having arranged his affairs for going abroad on the mission he had expected, decided to go without it.  He was really very fit for both of the offices he had sought, and so far as a man can deserve public place by public service, he had deserved it.  His pessimism was uncommonly well grounded, and if it did not go very deep, it might well have reached the bottom of his nature.

His daughter had begun to divine him at the early age when parents suppose themselves still to be mysteries to their children.  She did not think it necessary ever to explain him to others; perhaps she would not have found it possible; and now after she parted from Mrs. Eltwin and went to sit down beside Mrs. March she did not refer to her father.  She said how sweet she had found the old lady from Ohio; and what sort of place did Mrs. March suppose it was where Mrs. Eltwin lived?  They seemed to have everything there, like any place.  She had wanted to ask Mrs. Eltwin if they sat on their steps; but she had not quite dared.

Burnamy came by, slowly, and at Mrs. March’s suggestion he took one of the chairs on her other side, to help her and Miss Triscoe look at the Channel Islands and watch the approach of the steamer to Cherbourg, where the Norumbia was to land again.  The young people talked across Mrs. March to each other, and said how charming the islands were, in their gray-green insubstantiality, with valleys furrowing them far inward, like airy clefts in low banks of clouds.  It seemed all the nicer not to know just which was which; but when the ship drew nearer to Cherbourg, he suggested that they could see better by going round to the other side of the ship.  Miss Triscoe, as at the other times when she had gone off with Burnamy, marked her allegiance, to Mrs. March by leaving a wrap with her.

Every one was restless in breaking with the old life at sea.  There had been an equal unrest when the ship first sailed; people had first come aboard in the demoralization of severing their ties with home, and they shrank from forming others.  Then the charm of the idle, eventless life grew upon them, and united them in a fond reluctance from the inevitable end.