ve written
verse! She yearned to tell her whole history, but not one personal
question could she lure from Hugh. Silently she recalled the story of
her Creole grandmother, married at fifteen--her own present age. That
young lady had met her future husband just this way on Roosevelt's
famous _New Orleans_, earliest steamboat on the Mississippi. But there
sat Hugh, as square, as solid, and as incurious as an upended bale of
cotton. And still she kept her manners.

It was but the custom of the time and region that the most honored guest
of the _Votaress_, wife of her owner's most formidable competitor, with
her family, not only should enjoy her journey wholly without cost, but
that she should receive every attention courtesy could offer. The heat
of the contest counted for nothing. And so, while Ramsey ate and talked
with Hugh, his grandfather, near by in the ladies' cabin, at her left
and at Hugh's back, conversed with her mother on a sofa. It was a
heavenly hour. The resplendent boat kept her speed with no inward sign
of her ceaseless ongoing except the tremor of her perfect frame, the
flutter of her hundred-footed tread, and the tinkle and prismatic
twinkle of her pendent glass, all responsively alternating with the deep
breathings of her stacks, and with no sign of her frequent turnings but
the softly audible creepings of her steering-gear.

While never failing duly to receive and return Hugh's rather stiff
attentions, and while doing superb justice to the repast, Ramsey, with
side glances from her large, unconscious eyes emotionally enriched by
long auburn lashes, easily and with great zest contemplated her mother's
charming complexion, so lily-white and shell pink for a Creole matron,
as well as the lovely confidingness of her manner, so childlike yet so
wise. It was not for her to know that her mother, while hanging on every
word of the courtly old man, was closely observing both her and Hugh.

The grandfather, too, her blue-and-auburn glances took in sidewise, as
their closer scrutiny had earlier done pointblank on the hurricane-deck.
He was small, unmuscular, clean-shaven, erect, placid. She noted again
his snowy, waving hair, thin only on his pink crown. It shone like silk.
He still kept a soft flush of unimpaired health and an air of inner
cleanness equal to that which showed outwardly from gaitered shoes to
the bell-crowned beaver in his hand. She observed the wide cambric
ruffle that ran down his much-displa