cious and comfortable, and there was a
motherly decency in her long nursing rock and her rustling old-fashioned
gait, the multitudinous swish, in her wake, as of a thousand proper
petticoats. It was as if she wished not to present herself in port with
the splashed eagerness of a young creature. We weren't numerous enough
quite to elbow each other and yet weren't too few to support--with that
familiarity and relief which figures and objects acquire on the great
bare field of the ocean and under the great bright glass of the sky. I
had never liked the sea so much before, indeed I had never liked it at
all; but now I had a revelation of how in a midsummer mood it could
please. It was darkly and magnificently blue and imperturbably
quiet--save for the great regular swell of its heartbeats, the pulse of
its life; and there grew to be something so agreeable in the sense of
floating there in infinite isolation and leisure that it was a positive
godsend the _Patagonia_ was no racer. One had never thought of the sea
as the great place of safety, but now it came over one that there's no
place so safe from the land. When it doesn't confer trouble it takes
trouble away--takes away letters and telegrams and newspapers and visits
and duties and efforts, all the complications, all the superfluities and
superstitions that we have stuffed into our terrene life. The simple
absence of the post, when the particular conditions enable you to enjoy
the great fact by which it's produced, becomes in itself a positive
bliss, and the clean boards of the deck turn to the stage of a play that
amuses, the personal drama of the voyage, the movement and interaction,
in the strong sea-light, of figures that end by representing
something--something moreover of which the interest is never, even in its
keenness, too great to suffer you to slumber. I at any rate dozed to
excess, stretched on my rug with a French novel, and when I opened my
eyes I generally saw Jasper Nettlepoint pass with the young woman
confided to his mother's care on his arm. Somehow at these moments,
between sleeping and waking, I inconsequently felt that my French novel
had set them in motion. Perhaps this was because I had fallen into the
trick, at the start, of regarding Grace Mavis almost as a married woman,
which, as every one knows, is the necessary status of the heroine of such
a work. Every revolution of our engine at any rate would contribute to
the effect of making h