r hands. And on the fourth
day the formidable New Yorkers unexpectedly thawed.

I had once thought of Maude as plastic. Then I had discovered she had a
mind and will of her own. Once more she seemed plastic; her love had made
her so. Was it not what I had desired? I had only to express a wish, and
it became her law. Nay, she appealed to me many times a day to know
whether she had made any mistakes, and I began to drill her in my silly
traditions,--gently, very gently.

"Well, I shouldn't be quite so familiar with people, quite so ready to
make acquaintances, Maude. You have no idea who they may be. Some of
them, of course, like the Sardells, I know by reputation."

The Sardells were the New Yorkers who sat next us.

"I'll try, Hugh, to be more reserved, more like the wife of an important
man." She smiled.

"It isn't that you're not reserved," I replied, ignoring the latter half
of her remark. "Nor that I want you to change," I said. "I only want to
teach you what little of the world I know myself."

"And I want to learn, Hugh. You don't know how I want to learn!"

The sight of mist-ridden Liverpool is not a cheering one for the American
who first puts foot on the mother country's soil, a Liverpool of
yellow-browns and dingy blacks, of tilted funnels pouring out smoke into
an atmosphere already charged with it. The long wharves and shed roofs
glistened with moisture.

"Just think, Hugh, it's actually England!" she cried, as we stood on the
wet deck. But I felt as though I'd been there before.

"No wonder they're addicted to cold baths," I replied. "They must feel
perfectly at home in them, especially if they put a little lampblack in
the water."

Maude laughed.

"You grumpy old thing!" she exclaimed.

Nothing could dampen her ardour, not the sight of the rain-soaked stone
houses when we got ashore, nor even the frigid luncheon we ate in the
lugubrious hotel. For her it was all quaint and new. Finally we found
ourselves established in a compartment upholstered in light grey, with
tassels and arm-supporters, on the window of which was pasted a poster
with the word reserved in large, red letters. The guard inquired
respectfully, as the porter put our new luggage in the racks, whether we
had everything we wanted. The toy locomotive blew its toy whistle, and we
were off for the north; past dingy, yellow tenements of the smoking
factory towns, and stretches of orderly, hedge-spaced rain-swept country.
The quaint