“Well, I don’t know,” returned the editor.  “After all, we eat a good deal of bread, and we drink more pure water than any other people.  Even when we drink it iced, I fancy it isn’t so bad as absinthe.”

The young bride looked at him gratefully, but she said, “If we can’t get ice-water in Europe, I don’t know what Mr. Leffers will do,” and the talk threatened to pass among the ladies into a comparison of American and European customs.

Burnamy could not bear to let it.  “I don’t pretend to be very well up in French literature,” he began, “but I think such a book as ’The Maiden Knight’ isn’t such a bad piece of work; people are liking a pretty well-built story when they like it.  Of course it’s sentimental, and it begs the question a good deal; but it imagines something heroic in character, and it makes the reader imagine it too.  The man who wrote that book may be a donkey half the time, but he’s a genius the other half.  By-and-by he’ll do something—­after he’s come to see that his ’Maiden Knight’ was a fool—­that I believe even you won’t be down on, Mr. March, if he paints a heroic type as powerfully as he does in this book.”

He spoke with the authority of a journalist, and though he deferred to March in the end, he deferred with authority still.  March liked him for coming to the defence of a young writer whom he had not himself learned to like yet.  “Yes,” he said, “if he has the power you say, and can keep it after he comes to his artistic consciousness!”

Mrs. Leffers, as if she thought things were going her way, smiled; Rose Adding listened with shining eyes expectantly fixed on March; his mother viewed his rapture with tender amusement.  The steward was at Kenby’s shoulder with the salad and his entreating “Bleace!” and Triscoe seemed to be questioning whether he should take any notice of Burnamy’s general disagreement.  He said at last:  “I’m afraid we haven’t the documents.  You don’t seem to have cared much for French books, and I haven’t read ’The Maiden Knight’.”  He added to March:  “But I don’t defend absinthe.  Ice-water is better.  What I object to is our indiscriminate taste both for raw whiskey—­and for milk-and-water.”

No one took up the question again, and it was Kenby who spoke next.  “The doctor thinks, if this weather holds, that we shall be into Plymouth Wednesday morning.  I always like to get a professional opinion on the ship’s run.”

In the evening, as Mrs. March was putting away in her portfolio the journal-letter which she was writing to send back from Plymouth to her children, Miss Triscoe drifted to the place where she sat at their table in the dining-room by a coincidence which they both respected as casual.

“We had quite a literary dinner,” she remarked, hovering for a moment near the chair which she later sank into.  “It must have made you feel very much at home.  Or perhaps you’re so tired of it at home that you don’t talk about books.”