“There’s no need,” I answered smiling.

“Oh, Hugh, I don’t want to disgrace you!” she exclaimed, in real alarm.  “Otherwise, so far as I am concerned, I shouldn’t care who knew.”

People smiled at her.  Women came up and took her hands.  And on the fourth day the formidable New Yorkers unexpectedly thawed.

I had once thought of Maude as plastic.  Then I had discovered she had a mind and will of her own.  Once more she seemed plastic; her love had made her so.  Was it not what I had desired?  I had only to express a wish, and it became her law.  Nay, she appealed to me many times a day to know whether she had made any mistakes, and I began to drill her in my silly traditions,—­gently, very gently.

“Well, I shouldn’t be quite so familiar with people, quite so ready to make acquaintances, Maude.  You have no idea who they may be.  Some of them, of course, like the Sardells, I know by reputation.”

The Sardells were the New Yorkers who sat next us.

“I’ll try, Hugh, to be more reserved, more like the wife of an important man.”  She smiled.

“It isn’t that you’re not reserved,” I replied, ignoring the latter half of her remark.  “Nor that I want you to change,” I said.  “I only want to teach you what little of the world I know myself.”

“And I want to learn, Hugh.  You don’t know how I want to learn!”

The sight of mist-ridden Liverpool is not a cheering one for the American who first puts foot on the mother country’s soil, a Liverpool of yellow-browns and dingy blacks, of tilted funnels pouring out smoke into an atmosphere already charged with it.  The long wharves and shed roofs glistened with moisture.

“Just think, Hugh, it’s actually England!” she cried, as we stood on the wet deck.  But I felt as though I’d been there before.

“No wonder they’re addicted to cold baths,” I replied.  “They must feel perfectly at home in them, especially if they put a little lampblack in the water.”

Maude laughed.

“You grumpy old thing!” she exclaimed.

Nothing could dampen her ardour, not the sight of the rain-soaked stone houses when we got ashore, nor even the frigid luncheon we ate in the lugubrious hotel.  For her it was all quaint and new.  Finally we found ourselves established in a compartment upholstered in light grey, with tassels and arm-supporters, on the window of which was pasted a poster with the word reserved in large, red letters.  The guard inquired respectfully, as the porter put our new luggage in the racks, whether we had everything we wanted.  The toy locomotive blew its toy whistle, and we were off for the north; past dingy, yellow tenements of the smoking factory towns, and stretches of orderly, hedge-spaced rain-swept country.  The quaint cottages we glimpsed, the sight of distant, stately mansions on green slopes caused Maude to cry out with rapture:—­“Oh, Hugh, there’s a manor-house!”