ded at the same places, she had always been called
out about the same number of times, she had always felt very much
the same pleasure and satisfaction, and she had invariably eaten her
supper with the same appetite. Actors lead far more emotional lives
than singers, partly because they have the excitement of a new piece
much more often, with the tremendous nervous strain of a first night,
and largely because they are not obliged to keep themselves in such
perfect training. To an actor a cold, an indigestion, or a headache
is doubtless an annoyance; but to a leading singer such an accident
almost always means the impossibility of appearing at all, with
serious loss of money to the artist, and grave disappointment to the
public. The result of all this is that singers, as a rule, are much
more normal, healthy, and well-balanced people than other musicians,
or than actors. Moreover they generally have very strong bodies and
constitutions to begin with, and when they have not they break down
young.

Paul Griggs had an old traveller's preference for having plenty of
time, and he was on board the steamer on Saturday a full hour before
she was to sail; his not very numerous belongings, which looked as
weather-beaten as himself, were piled up unopened in his cabin, and he
himself stood on the upper promenade deck watching the passengers as
they came on board. He was an observant man, and it interested him to
note the expression of each new face that appeared; for the fact
of starting on a voyage across the ocean is apt to affect people
inversely as their experience. Those who cross often look so
unconcerned that a casual observer might think they were not to start
at all, whereas those who are going for the first time are either
visibly flurried, or are posing to look as if they were not, though
they are intensely nervous about their belongings; or they try to
appear as if they belonged to the ship, or else as if the ship
belonged to them, making observations which are supposed to be
nautical, but which instantly stamp them as unutterable land-lubbers
in the shrewd estimation of the stewards; and the latter, as every old
hand is aware, always know everything much better than the captain.

Margaret Donne had been the most sensible and simple of young girls,
and when she appeared at the gangway very quietly dressed in brown,
with a brown fur collar, a brown hat, a brown veil, and a brown
parasol, there was really nothing striki