Mrs. Adding often took the chair beside Mrs. March when her husband was straying about the ship or reading in his berth; and the two ladies must have exchanged autobiographies, for Mrs. March was able to tell him just how long Mrs. Adding had been a widow, what her husband died of, and what had been done to save him; how she was now perfectly wrapt up in her boy, and was taking him abroad, with some notion of going to Switzerland, after the summer’s travel, and settling down with him at school there.  She and Mrs. March became great friends; and Rose, as his mother called him, attached himself reverently to March, not only as a celebrity of the first grade in his quality of editor of ‘Every Other Week’, but as a sage of wisdom and goodness, with whom he must not lose the chance of counsel upon almost every hypothesis and exigency of life.

March could not bring himself to place Burnamy quite where he belonged in contemporary literature, when Rose put him very high in virtue of the poem which he heard Burnamy was going to have printed in ’Every Other Week’, and of the book which he was going to have published; and he let the boy bring to the young fellow the flattery which can come to any author but once, in the first request for his autograph that Burnamy confessed to have had.  They were so near in age, though they were ten years apart, that Rose stood much more in awe of Burnamy than of others much more his seniors.  He was often in the company of Kenby, whom he valued next to March as a person acquainted with men; he consulted March upon Kenby’s practice of always taking up the language of the country he visited, if it were only for a fortnight; and he conceived a higher opinion of him from March’s approval.

Burnamy was most with Mrs. March, who made him talk about himself when he supposed he was talking about literature, in the hope that she could get him to talk about the Triscoes; but she listened in vain as he poured out-his soul in theories of literary art, and in histories of what he had written and what he meant to write.  When he passed them where they sat together, March heard the young fellow’s perpetually recurring I, I, I, my, my, my, me, me, me; and smiled to think how she was suffering under the drip-drip of his innocent egotism.

She bore in a sort of scientific patience his attentions to the pivotal girl, and Miss Triscoe’s indifference to him, in which a less penetrating scrutiny could have detected no change from meal to meal.  It was only at table that she could see them together, or that she could note any break in the reserve of the father and daughter.  The signs of this were so fine that when she reported them March laughed in scornful incredulity.  But at breakfast the third day out, the Triscoes, with the authority of people accustomed to social consideration, suddenly turned to the Marches, and began to make themselves agreeable; the father spoke to March of ’Every Other Week’, which he seemed to know of in its