call it nothing else--
premature; a mistake worth making, however, for the almost overdone
drollery in which her answer instinctively sought refuge.

"Water-tight--the biggest compartment of all? Why, it's the best cabin
and the main deck and the engine-room and the steward's pantry! It's the
ship itself--it's the whole line. It's the captain's table and all one's
luggage--one's reading for the trip." She had images, like that, that
were drawn from steamers and trains, from a familiarity with "lines," a
command of "own" cars, from an experience of continents and seas,
that he was unable as yet to emulate; from vast modern machineries and
facilities whose acquaintance he had still to make, but as to which it
was part of the interest of his situation as it stood that he could,
quite without wincing, feel his future likely to bristle with them.

It was in fact, content as he was with his engagement and charming as
he thought his affianced bride, his view of THAT furniture that mainly
constituted our young man's "romance"--and to an extent that made of his
inward state a contrast that he was intelligent enough to feel. He was
intelligent enough to feel quite humble, to wish not to be in the least
hard or voracious, not to insist on his own side of the bargain, to warn
himself in short against arrogance and greed. Odd enough, of a truth,
was his sense of this last danger--which may illustrate moreover his
general attitude toward dangers from within. Personally, he considered,
he hadn't the vices in question--and that was so much to the good. His
race, on the other hand, had had them handsomely enough, and he was
somehow full of his race. Its presence in him was like the consciousness
of some inexpugnable scent in which his clothes, his whole person,
his hands and the hair of his head, might have been steeped as in some
chemical bath: the effect was nowhere in particular, yet he constantly
felt himself at the mercy of the cause. He knew his antenatal history,
knew it in every detail, and it was a thing to keep causes well before
him. What was his frank judgment of so much of its ugliness, he asked
himself, but a part of the cultivation of humility? What was this so
important step he had just taken but the desire for some new history
that should, so far as possible, contradict, and even if need be flatly
dishonour, the old? If what had come to him wouldn't do he must
MAKE something different. He perfectly recognised--always in