The Worthingtons had plainly the good fortune to be respectable sailors.  They reappeared on the second day and established regular habits, after the manner of accustomed travellers.  Miss Vanderpoel’s habits were regular from the first, and when Salter saw her he was impressed even more at the outset with her air of being at home instead of on board ship.  Her practically well-chosen corner was an agreeable place to look at.  Her chair was built for ease of angle and width, her cushions were of dark rich colours, her travelling rugs were of black fox fur, and she owned an adjustable table for books and accompaniments.  She appeared early in the morning and walked until the sea air crimsoned her cheeks, she sat and read with evident enjoyment, she talked to her companions and plainly entertained them.

Salter, being bored and in bad spirits, found himself watching her rather often, but he knew that but for the small, comic episode of Tommy, he would have definitely disliked her.  The dislike would not have been fair, but it would have existed in spite of himself.  It would not have been fair because it would have been founded simply upon the ignoble resentment of envy, upon the poor truth that he was not in the state of mind to avoid resenting the injustice of fate in bestowing multi-millions upon one person and his offspring.  He resented his own resentment, but was obliged to acknowledge its existence in his humour.  He himself, especially and peculiarly, had always known the bitterness of poverty, the humiliation of seeing where money could be well used, indeed, ought to be used, and at the same time having ground into him the fact that there was no money to lay one’s hand on.  He had hated it even as a boy, because in his case, and that of his people, the whole thing was undignified and unbecoming.  It was humiliating to him now to bring home to himself the fact that the thing for which he was inclined to dislike this tall, up-standing girl was her unconscious (he realised the unconsciousness of it) air of having always lived in the atmosphere of millions, of never having known a reason why she should not have anything she had a desire for.  Perhaps, upon the whole, he said to himself, it was his own ill luck and sense of defeat which made her corner, with its cushions and comforts, her properly attentive maid, and her cold weather sables expressive of a fortune too colossal to be decent.

The episode of the plump, despairing Tommy he had liked, however.  There had been a fine naturalness about it and a fine practicalness in her prompt order to the elderly nurse that the richly-caparisoned donkey should be sent to her.  This had at once made it clear to the donor that his gift was too valuable to be left behind.

“She did not care twopence for the lot of us,” was his summing up.  “She might have been nothing but the nicest possible warm-hearted nursemaid or a cottage woman who loved the child.”