peed.

"Senator, 'twas I sent you them hot rolls, suh."

"Why, thank you! But--don't disfurnish yourself."

"General, them fried bananas----"

"Th-th-thank you, sir, I have a suff-fficient plenty."

Only the seats of the Courteneys, the Gilmores, Ramsey, and Basile stood
vacant.

XXXIX

FORTITUDE

"Courage," the slender play was called. It is to be regretted that we
cannot fully set it forth, for Gilmore was himself its author.

Also because, whatever it lacked, there was in it a lucky fitness for
this occasion, since, conditions being what they were on the decks above
and below, the one strong apology for giving it was the need of
upholding the courage of its audience.

It was even a sort of kind rejoinder to the various ferments kept up by
the truculent twins, the pusillanimous exhorter, and the terrified
Basile. Its preachment might well have been less obvious, though lines,
its author bade Hugh notice, never overbalanced action, never came till
situation called them. It was to the effect, first, that courage is
human character's prime essential, without which no rightness or
goodness is stable or real; and, second, that as no virtue of character
can be relied on where courage is poor, so neither can courage be
trusted for right conduct when unmated to other virtues of character,
the chiefest being fidelity--fidelity to truth and right, of course,
since fidelity to evil is but a contradiction of terms. "From courage
and fidelity," it was the part of one player at a telling moment to say,
"springs the whole arch of character," and again, "These are the Adam
and Eve of all the virtues." (Adam and Eve were decided to be quite
mentionable. Mention was not impersonation.)

Naturally the Gilmores knew every line of the play.

"As perfectly," ventured the two young Napoleonites, "as John the
Baptist knows the moral law, don't you?"

"Better, I infer," said Gilmore abstractedly. They were in the ladies'
cabin, awaiting its preparation as a stage, behind the curtains that
screened it from the gentlemen's cabin, the auditorium. His wife smiled
for him.

"Even my Harriet," she said, "knows one or two parts. She's played Miss
Ramsey's in emergencies."

Her half-dozen feminine hearers flinched. Yet one said, excusingly:
"That's a servant's part, anyhow."

"And Harriet's her very size and shape," said another.

And another, drolly: "They're enough alike to be kin!"

"Harriet's free, isn't she?" aske