There were various smells which stored themselves up in the consciousness to remain lastingly relative to certain moments and places:  a whiff of whiskey and tobacco that exhaled from the door of the smoking-room; the odor of oil and steam rising from the open skylights over the engine-room; the scent of stale bread about the doors of the dining-saloon.

The life was like the life at a sea-side hotel, only more monotonous.  The walking was limited; the talk was the tentative talk of people aware that there was no refuge if they got tired of one another.  The flirting itself, such as there was of it, must be carried on in the glare of the pervasive publicity; it must be crude and bold, or not be at all.

There seemed to be very little of it.  There were not many young people on board of saloon quality, and these were mostly girls.  The young men were mainly of the smoking-room sort; they seldom risked themselves among the steamer chairs.  It was gayer in the second cabin, and gayer yet in the steerage, where robuster emotions were operated by the accordion.  The passengers there danced to its music; they sang to it and laughed to it unabashed under the eyes of the first-cabin witnesses clustered along the rail above the pit where they took their rude pleasures.

With March it came to his spending many hours of each long, swift day in his berth with a book under the convenient electric light.  He was safe there from the acquaintances which constantly formed themselves only to fall into disintegration, and cling to him afterwards as inorganic particles of weather-guessing, and smoking-room gossip about the ship’s run.

In the earliest hours of the voyage he thought that he saw some faces of the great world, the world of wealth and fashion; but these afterward vanished, and left him to wonder where they hid themselves.  He did not meet them even in going to and from his meals; he could only imagine them served in those palatial state-rooms whose interiors the stewards now and then rather obtruded upon the public.  There were people whom he encountered in the promenades when he got up for the sunrise, and whom he never saw at other times; at midnight he met men prowling in the dark whom he never met by day.  But none of these were people of the great world.  Before six o’clock they were sometimes second-cabin passengers, whose barrier was then lifted for a little while to give them the freedom of the saloon promenade.

From time to time he thought he would look up his Ohioan, and revive from a closer study of him his interest in the rare American who had never been to Europe.  But he kept with his elderly wife, who had the effect of withholding him from March’s advances.  Young Mr. and Mrs. Leffers threw off more and more their disguise of a long-married pair, and became frankly bride and groom.  They seldom talked with any one else, except at table; they walked up and down together, smiling into each others faces; they sat side by side in their steamer chairs; one shawl covered them both, and there was reason to believe that they were holding each other’s hands under it.