been
offered; and hoisting herself in she wished both her fellow-passengers
a boisterous good evening. The lady, evidently an able person,
arranged her parcels swiftly and neatly in the racks, pulled up the
windows, slammed the ventilators, stripped off her cloak, flung back
her veil, and sitting down with a sigh of vast depth and length stared
steadily for five minutes without wavering at the other two. At the
end of that time she and the mother began, as with a common impulse,
to talk. And at the end of five minutes more they had told each other
where they were going, where they had been, what their husbands
were, the number, age, and girth of their children, and all the
adjectives that might most conveniently be used to describe their
servants. The adjectives, very lurid ones, took some time.
Priscilla shut her eyes while they were going on, thankful to be
left quiet, feeling unstrung to the last degree; and she gradually
dropped into an uneasy doze whose chief feature was the distressful
repetition, like hammer-strokes on her brain, of the words, "You're
deteriorating--deteriorating--deteriorating."

"_Lieber Gott_," she whispered at last, folding her hands in her lap,
"don't let me deteriorate too much. Please keep me from wanting to box
people's ears. _Lieber Gott_, it's so barbarous of me. I never used to
want to. Please stop me wanting to now."

And after that she dropped off quite, into a placid little slumber.

III

They crossed from Calais in the turbine. Their quickest route would
have been Cologne-Ostend-Dover, and every moment being infinitely
valuable Fritzing wanted to go that way, but Priscilla was determined
to try whether turbines are really as steady as she had heard they
were. The turbine was so steady that no one could have told it was
doing anything but being quiescent on solid earth; but that was
because, as Fritzing explained, there was a dead calm, and in dead
calms--briefly, he explained the conduct of boats in dead calms with
much patience, and Priscilla remarked when he had done that they might
then, after all, have crossed by Ostend.

"We might, ma'am, and we would be in London now if we had," said
Fritzing.

They had, indeed, lost several hours and some money coming by Calais,
and Fritzing had lost his temper as well.

Fritzing, you remember, was sixty, and had not closed his eyes all
night. He had not, so far as that goes, closed his eyes for nights
without number; and