e thought
of our real circumstances. At dinner we had valentine music, dreamy
stuff to accord with the shaded lamps which displayed the tables in a
lower rosy light. It helped to extend the mysterious and romantic
shadows. The pale, disembodied masks of the waiters swam in the dusk
above the tinted light. I had for a companion a vivacious American lady
from the Middle West, and she looked round that prospect we had of an
expensive cafe, and said, "Well, but I am disappointed. Why, I've been
looking forward to seeing the ocean, you know. And it isn't here."

"Smooth passage," remarked a man on the other side. "No sea at all
worth mentioning." Actually, I know there was a heavy beam sea running
before a half-gale. I could guess the officer in charge somewhere on
the exposed roof might have another mind about it; but it made no
difference to us in our circle of rosy intimate light bound by those
vague shadows which were alive with ready servitude.

"And I've been reading _Captains Courageous_ with this voyage in view.
Isn't this the month when the forties roar? I want to hear them roar,
just once, you know, and as gently as any sucking dove." We all
laughed. "We can't even tell we're in a ship."

She began to discuss Kipling's book. "There's some fine seas in that.
Have you read it? But I'd like to know where that ocean is he pretends
to have seen. I do believe the realists are no more reliable than the
romanticists. Here we are a thousand miles out, and none of us has seen
the sea yet. Tell me, does not a realist have to magnify his awful
billows just to get them into his reader's view?"

I murmured something feeble and sociable. I saw then why sailors never
talk directly of the sea. I, for instance, could not find my key at
that moment--it was in another pocket somewhere--so I had no iron to
touch. Talking largely of the sea is something like the knowing talk of
young men about women; and what is a simple sailor man that he should
open his mouth on mysteries?

Only on the liner's boat-deck, where you could watch her four funnels
against the sky, could you see to what extent the liner was rolling.
The arc seemed to be considerable then, but slowly described. But the
roll made little difference to the promenaders below. Sometimes they
walked a short distance on the edges of their boots, leaning over as
they did so, and swerving from the straight, as though they had turned
giddy. The shadows formed by the weak sunlight