The promenades, were as uncomfortably crowded as the sidewalk of Fourteenth Street on a summer’s day, and showed much the social average of a New York shopping thoroughfare.  Distinction is something that does not always reveal itself at first sight on land, and at sea it is still more retrusive.  A certain democracy of looks and clothes was the most notable thing to March in the apathetic groups and detached figures.  His criticism disabled the saloon passengers of even so much personal appeal as he imagined in some of the second-cabin passengers whom he saw across their barrier; they had at least the pathos of their exclusion, and he could wonder if they felt it or envied him.  At Hoboken he had seen certain people coming on board who looked like swells; but they had now either retired from the crowd, or they had already conformed to the prevailing type.  It was very well as a type; he was of it himself; but he wished that beauty as well as distinction had not been so lost in it.

In fact, he no longer saw so much beauty anywhere as he once did.  It might be that he saw life more truly than when he was young, and that his glasses were better than his eyes had been; but there were analogies that forbade his thinking so, and he sometimes had his misgivings that the trouble was with his glasses.  He made what he could of a pretty girl who had the air of not meaning to lose a moment from flirtation, and was luring her fellow-passengers from under her sailor hat.  She had already attached one of them; and she was hooking out for more.  She kept moving herself from the waist up, as if she worked there on a pivot, showing now this side and now that side of her face, and visiting the admirer she had secured with a smile as from the lamp of a revolving light as she turned.

While he was dwelling upon this folly, with a sense of impersonal pleasure in it as complete through his years as if he were already a disembodied spirit, the pulse of the engines suddenly ceased, and he joined the general rush to the rail, with a fantastic expectation of seeing another distracted mother put off; but it was only the pilot leaving the ship.  He was climbing down the ladder which hung over the boat, rising and sinking on the sea below, while the two men in her held her from the ship’s side with their oars; in the offing lay the white steam-yacht which now replaces the picturesque pilot-sloop of other times.  The Norumbia’s screws turned again under half a head of steam; the pilot dropped from the last rung of the ladder into the boat, and caught the bundle of letters tossed after him.  Then his men let go the line that was towing their craft, and the incident of the steamer’s departure was finally closed.  It had been dramatically heightened perhaps by her final impatience to be off at some added risks to the pilot and his men, but not painfully so, and March smiled to think how men whose lives are all of dangerous chances seem always to take as many of them as they can.