better progress with your oars?"

"By 'better' do you mean _quicker_ progress?" he asked, so naively that
she concluded he was a trifle stupid. The best-looking ones were usually
stupid.

"Yes, of course," she said, impatient. "It's all very well to push a
punt across a mill-pond that way, but it's not treating the Atlantic
with very much respect."

"_You_ were not particularly respectful toward the Atlantic Ocean when
you started to swim across it."

But again the echo of amusement in his voice found no response in her
unsmiling silence.

He thought to himself: "Is she a prude, or merely stupid! The pity of
it!--with her eyes of a thinking goddess!--and no ideas behind them!
What she understands is the commonplace. Let us offer her the obvious."

And, aloud, fatuously: "This is a rarely beautiful scene--"

"What?" crisply.

And feeling mildly wicked he continued:

--"Soft skies, a sea of Ionian azure; one might almost expect to see a
triareme heading up yonder out of the south, festooned with the golden
fleece. This is just the sort of a scene for a triareme; don't you think
so?"

Her reply was the slightest possible nod.

He looked at her meanly amused:

"It's really very classical," he said, "like the voyage of Ulysses; I,
Ulysses, you the water nymph Calypso, drifting in that golden ship of
Romance--"

"Calypso was a _land_ nymph," she observed, absently, "if accuracy
interests you as much as your monologue."

Checked and surprised, he began to laugh at his own discomfiture; and
she, elbow on the gunwale, small hand cupping her chin, watched him with
an expressionless directness that very soon extinguished his amusement
and left him awkward in the silence.

"I've tried my very best to be civil and agreeable," he said after a
moment. "Is it really such an effort for you to talk to a man?"

"Not if I am interested," she said quietly.

He felt that his ears were growing red; she noticed it, too, and added:
"I do not mean to be _too_ rude; and I am quite sure you do not either."

"Of course not," he said; "only I couldn't help seeing the humour of
romance in our ocean encounter. I think anybody would--except you--"

"What?"

The crisp, quick question which, with her, usually seemed like an
exclamation, always startled him into temporary silence; then he began
more carefully:

"There was one chance in a million of your finding my boat in the fog.
If you hadn't found it--" He shook his head. "