The cigar girl bowed her head in simulated fright, sped past the incoming tourists, and lost herself in the shifting crowd on the street. Almer permitted himself to mutter angrily as he turned back to his books.
"You see, mother? See that hotel keeper lose his temper and tongue-lash that poor girl? Just what I tell you—these foreigners don't know how to be polite to ladies."
Henry J. Sherman—"yes, sir, of Kewanee, Illynoy"—mopped his bald pink dome and glared truculently at the insulting back of Joseph Almer. Mrs. Sherman, the lady of direct impulses who had contrived to stare Captain Woodhouse out of countenance in the Winter Garden not long back, cast herself despondently on the decrepit lounge and appeared to need little invitation to be precipitated into a crying spell. Her daughter Kitty, a winsome little slip, stood behind her, arms about the mother's neck, and her hands stroking the maternal cheeks.
"There—there, mother; everything'll come out right," Kitty vaguely assured. Mrs. Sherman, determined to have no eye for the cloud's silver lining, rocked back and forth on the sofa and gave voice to her woe:
"Oh, we'll never see Kewanee again. I know it! I know it! With everybody pushing and shoving us away from the steamers—everybody refusing to cash our checks, and all this fighting going on somewhere up among the Belgians——" The lady from Kewanee pulled out the stopper of her grief, and the tears came copiously. Mr. Sherman, who had made an elaborate pretense of studying a steamer guide he found on the table, looked up hurriedly and blew his nose loudly in sympathy.
"Cheer up, mother. Even if this first trip of ours—this 'Grand Tower,' as the guide-books call it—has been sorta tough, we had one compensation anyway. We saw the Palace of Peace at the Hague before the war broke out. Guess they're leasing it for a skating rink now, though."
"How can you joke when we're in such a fix? He-Henry, you ne-never do take things seriously!"
"Why not joke, mother? Only thing you can do over here you don't have to pay for. Cheer up! There's the Saxonia due here from Naples some time soon. Maybe we can horn a way up her gangplank. Consul says——"
Mrs. Sherman looked up from her handkerchief with withering scorn.
"Tell me a way we can get aboard any ship without having the money to pay our passage. Tell me that, Henry Sherman!"