The ship was very full, but Mrs. March did not show the slightest curiosity to know who her fellow-passengers were.  She said that she wished to be let perfectly alone, even by her own emotions, and for this reason she forbade March to bring her a list of the passengers till after they had left Queenstown lest it should be too exciting.  He did not take the trouble to look it up, therefore; and the first night out he saw no one whom he knew at dinner; but the next morning at breakfast he found himself to his great satisfaction at the same table with the Eltwins.  They were so much at ease with him that even Mrs. Eltwin took part in the talk, and told him how they had spent the time of her husband’s rigorous after-cure in Switzerland, and now he was going home much better than they had expected.  She said they had rather thought of spending the winter in Europe, but had given it up because they were both a little homesick.  March confessed that this was exactly the case with his wife and himself; and he had to add that Mrs. March was not very well otherwise, and he should be glad to be at home on her account.  The recurrence of the word home seemed to deepen Eltwin’s habitual gloom, and Mrs. Eltwin hastened to leave the subject of their return for inquiry into Mrs. March’s condition; her interest did not so far overcome her shyness that she ventured to propose a visit to her; and March found that the fact of the Eltwins’ presence on board did not agitate his wife.  It seemed rather to comfort her, and she said she hoped he would see all he could of the poor old things.  She asked if he had met any one else he knew, and he was able to tell her that there seemed to be a good many swells on board, and this cheered her very much, though he did not know them; she liked to be near the rose, though it was not a flower that she really cared for.

She did not ask who the swells were, and March took no trouble to find out.  He took no trouble to get a passenger-list, and he had the more trouble when he tried at last; the lists seemed to have all vanished, as they have a habit of doing, after the first day; the one that he made interest for with the head steward was a second-hand copy, and had no one he knew in it but the Eltwins.  The social solitude, however, was rather favorable to certain other impressions.  There seemed even more elderly people than there were on the Norumbia; the human atmosphere was gray and sober; there was nothing of the gay expansion of the outward voyage; there was little talking or laughing among those autumnal men who were going seriously and anxiously home, with faces fiercely set for the coming grapple; or necks meekly bowed for the yoke.  They had eaten their cake, and it had been good, but there remained a discomfort in the digestion.  They sat about in silence, and March fancied that the flown summer was as dreamlike to each of them as it now was to him.  He hated to be of their dreary company, but spiritually he knew that he was of it; and he vainly turned to cheer himself with the younger passengers.  Some matrons who went about clad in furs amused him, for they must have been unpleasantly warm in their jackets and boas; nothing but the hope of being able to tell the customs inspector with a good conscience that the things had been worn, would have sustained one lady draped from head to foot in Astrakhan.