An elderly man, with a thin, grave, aquiline face, said, “I shouldn’t want a child of mine down there.”

“No,” March responded, “it isn’t quite what one would choose for one’s own.  It’s astonishing, though, how we reconcile ourselves to it in the case of others.”

“I suppose it’s something we’ll have to get used to on the other side,” suggested the stranger.

“Well,” answered March, “you have some opportunities to get used to it on this side, if you happen to live in New York,” and he went on to speak of the raggedness which often penetrated the frontier of comfort where he lived in Stuyvesant Square, and which seemed as glad of alms in food or money as this poverty of the steerage.

The other listened restively like a man whose ideals are disturbed.  “I don’t believe I should like to live in New York, much,” he said, and March fancied that he wished to be asked where he did live.  It appeared that he lived in Ohio, and he named his town; he did not brag of it, but he said it suited him.  He added that he had never expected to go to Europe, but that he had begun to run down lately, and his doctor thought he had better go out and try Carlsbad.

March said, to invite his further confidence, that this was exactly his own case.  The Ohio man met the overture from a common invalidism as if it detracted from his own distinction; and he turned to speak of the difficulty, he had in arranging his affairs for leaving home.  His heart opened a little with the word, and he said how comfortable he and his wife were in their house, and how much they both hated to shut it up.  When March offered him his card, he said he had none of his own with him, but that his name was Eltwin.  He betrayed a simple wish to have March realize the local importance he had left behind him; and it was not hard to comply; March saw a Grand Army button in the lapel of his coat, and he knew that he was in the presence of a veteran.

He tried to guess his rank; in telling his wife about him, when he went down to find her just before dinner, but he ended with a certain sense of affliction.  “There are too many elderly invalids on this ship.  I knock against people of my own age everywhere.  Why aren’t your youthful lovers more in evidence, my dear?  I don’t believe they are lovers, and I begin to doubt if they’re young even.”

“It wasn’t very satisfactory at lunch, certainly,” she owned.  “But I know it will be different at dinner.”  She was putting herself together after a nap that had made up for the lost sleep of the night before.  “I want you to look very nice, dear.  Shall you dress for dinner?” she asked her husband’s image in the state-room glass which she was preoccupying.

“I shall dress in my pea-jacket and sea-boots,” it answered.

“I have heard that they always dress for dinner on the big Cunard and White Star boats, when it’s good weather,” she went on, placidly.  “I shouldn’t want those people to think you were not up in the convenances.”