They had not been seasick, though.  I heard them say so.  They had been indisposed, possibly from something they had eaten; but they had not been seasick.  Well, I had my own periods of indisposition going over; and if it had been seasickness I should not hesitate a moment about coming right out and saying so.  In these matters I believe in being absolutely frank and aboveboard.  For the life of me I cannot understand why people will dissemble and lie about this thing of being seasick.  To me their attitude is a source of constant wonderment.

On land the average person is reasonably proud of having been sick—­after he begins to get better.  It gives him something to talk about.  The pale and interesting invalid invariably commands respect ashore.  In my own list of acquaintances I number several persons—­mainly widowed ladies with satisfactory incomes—­who never feel well unless they are ill.  In the old days they would have had resort to patent medicines and the family lot at Laurel Grove Cemetery; but now they go in for rest cures and sea voyages, and the baths at Carlsbad and specialists, these same being main contributing causes to the present high cost of living, and also helping to explain what becomes of some of those large life-insurance policies you read about.  Possibly you know the type I am describing—­the lady who, when planning where she will spend the summer, sends for catalogues from all the leading sanatoriums.  We had one such person with us.

She had been surgically remodeled so many times that she dated everything from her last operation.  At least six times in her life she had been down with something that was absolutely incurable, and she was now going to Homburg to have one of the newest and most fatal German diseases in its native haunts, where it would be at its best.  She herself said that she was but a mere shell; and for the first few meals she ate like one—­like a large, empty shell with plenty of curves inside it.

However, when, after a subsequent period of seclusion, she emerged from her stateroom wearing the same disheveled look that Jonah must have worn when he and the whale parted company, do you think she would confess she had been seasick?  Not by any means!  She said she had had a raging headache.  But she could not fool me.  She had the stateroom next to mine and I had heard what I had heard.  She was from near Boston and she had the near-Boston accent; and she was the only person I ever met who was seasick with the broad A.

Personally I abhor those evasions, which deceive no one.  If I had been seasick I should not deny it here or elsewhere.  For a time I thought I was seasick.  I know now I was wrong—­but I thought so.  There was something about the sardels served at lunch—­their look or their smell or something—­which seemed to make them distasteful to me; and I excused myself from the company at the table and went up and out into the open air.  But the deck was unpleasantly congested with great burly brutes—­beefy, carnivorous, overfed creatures, gorged with victuals and smoking disgustingly strong black cigars, and grinning in an annoying and meaning sort of way every time they passed a body who preferred to lie quiet.