They both knew that she meant the reticent father and daughter, and March flung out, “I shouldn’t want them to think you weren’t.  There’s such a thing as overdoing.”

She attacked him at another point.  “What has annoyed you?  What else have you been doing?”

“Nothing.  I’ve been reading most of the afternoon.”

“The Maiden Knight?”

This was the book which nearly everybody had brought on board.  It was just out, and had caught an instant favor, which swelled later to a tidal wave.  It depicted a heroic girl in every trying circumstance of mediaeval life, and gratified the perennial passion of both sexes for historical romance, while it flattered woman’s instinct of superiority by the celebration of her unintermitted triumphs, ending in a preposterous and wholly superfluous self-sacrifice.

March laughed for pleasure in her guess, and she pursued, “I suppose you didn’t waste time looking if anybody had brought the last copy of ’Every Other Week’?”

“Yes, I did; and I found the one you had left in your steamer chair—­for advertising purposes, probably.”

“Mr. Burnamy has another,” she said.  “I saw it sticking out of his pocket this morning.”

“Oh, yes.  He told me he had got it on the train from Chicago to see if it had his poem in it.  He’s an ingenuous soul—­in some ways.”

“Well, that is the very reason why you ought to find out whether the men are going to dress, and let him know.  He would never think of it himself.”

“Neither would I,” said her husband.

“Very well, if you wish to spoil his chance at the outset,” she sighed.

She did not quite know whether to be glad or not that the men were all in sacks and cutaways at dinner; it saved her, from shame for her husband and Mr. Burnamy; but it put her in the wrong.  Every one talked; even the father and daughter talked with each other, and at one moment Mrs. March could not be quite sure that the daughter had not looked at her when she spoke.  She could not be mistaken in the remark which the father addressed to Burnamy, though it led to nothing.

XII.

The dinner was uncommonly good, as the first dinner out is apt to be; and it went gayly on from soup to fruit, which was of the American abundance and variety, and as yet not of the veteran freshness imparted by the ice-closet.  Everybody was eating it, when by a common consciousness they were aware of alien witnesses.  They looked up as by a single impulse, and saw at the port the gaunt face of a steerage passenger staring down upon their luxury; he held on his arm a child that shared his regard with yet hungrier eyes.  A boy’s nose showed itself as if tiptoed to the height of the man’s elbow; a young girl peered over his other arm.

The passengers glanced at one another; the two table-stewards, with their napkins in their hands, smiled vaguely, and made some indefinite movements.