Baby Van Rensselaer [calmly]: And if you’ll excuse me, I’ll finish my book. I can’t read in the cabin.
Baby Van Rensselaer resumed her reading and found the book improved a little. After a while she looked up and saw Dear Jones sitting on the rail, meekly twirling his thumbs.
Baby Van Rensselaer [after an effort at silence]: Don’t be so ridiculously absurd. What are you doing there?
Dear Jones: I’m waiting to be spoken to.
Baby Van Rensselaer smiled. The boat had just swung out of the jaws of the bay. Overhead was the full glory of a sky which made one believe that there never was such a thing as a cloud. And they sped along over the sea of water in a sea of light. Just then there came from the depths under the cabin the rise and fall of a measured, mocking melody, high and clear as the notes of a lark.
Baby Van Rensselaer: Why, that must be a bird whistling—only birds don’t whistle “Amaryllis.”
Dear Jones: ’Tisn’t a bird—it’s an engineer.
Baby Van Rensselaer: An engineer?
Dear Jones: A grimy engineer. Quite a pathetic story, too. Some of the Sag Harbor people took him up as a boy. He had a wonderful ear and an extraordinary tenor voice. They were going to make a Mario of him. They paid for his education in New York, and then sent him over to Paris to the Conservatory to be finished off. And he hadn’t been there six weeks before he caught the regular Paris pleurisy—it’s an article de Paris, you know, and lost his voice utterly and hopelessly.
Baby Van Rensselaer: Oh!