“Well, then, let’s talk about our Silver Wedding Journey.”

“I see.  You merely want to tease and I am not in the humor for it.”

She said this in a great many different ways, and then she was really silent.  He perceived that she was hurt; and he tried to win her back to good-humor.  He asked her if she would not like to go over to Hoboken and look at one of the Hanseatic League steamers, some day; and she refused.  When he sent the next day and got a permit to see the boat; she consented to go.

III.

He was one of those men who live from the inside outward; he often took a hint for his actions from his fancies; and now because he had fancied some people going to look at steamers on Sundays, he chose the next Sunday himself for their visit to the Hanseatic boat at Hoboken.  To be sure it was a leisure day with him, but he might have taken the afternoon of any other day, for that matter, and it was really that invisible thread of association which drew him.

The Colmannia had been in long enough to have made her toilet for the outward voyage, and was looking her best.  She was tipped and edged with shining brass, without and within, and was red-carpeted and white-painted as only a ship knows how to be.  A little uniformed steward ran before the visitors, and showed them through the dim white corridors into typical state-rooms on the different decks; and then let them verify their first impression of the grandeur of the dining-saloon, and the luxury of the ladies’ parlor and music-room.  March made his wife observe that the tables and sofas and easy-chairs, which seemed so carelessly scattered about, were all suggestively screwed fast to the floor against rough weather; and he amused himself with the heavy German browns and greens and coppers in the decorations, which he said must have been studied in color from sausage, beer, and spinach, to the effect of those large march-panes in the roof.  She laughed with him at the tastelessness of the race which they were destined to marvel at more and more; but she made him own that the stewardesses whom they saw were charmingly like serving-maids in the ‘Fliegende Blatter’; when they went ashore she challenged his silence for some assent to her own conclusion that the Colmannia was perfect.

“She has only one fault,” he assented.  “She’s a ship.”

“Yes,” said his wife, “and I shall want to look at the Norumbia before I decide.”

Then he saw that it was only a question which steamer they should take, and not whether they should take any.  He explained, at first gently and afterwards savagely, that their visit to the Colmannia was quite enough for him, and that the vessel was not built that he would be willing to cross the Atlantic in.