The older woman concealed the bottle in her stateroom, but the effects of what had already been consumed did not at once pass away. Their recklessness increased: it became manifest, to some small degree, in speech. Once or twice Ned’s quips were a shade off-color, but always rollicking laughter was the response: once Mrs. Hardenworth, half without thinking, turned a phrase in such a way that a questionable inference could hardly be avoided.
“Why, mama!” Lenore exclaimed, in mock amazement. “Thank heaven you’ve got the grace to blush.”
“You wicked old woman,” Ned followed up with pretended gravity. “What if our little needlewoman had heard you!”
In reality Bess Gilbert had overheard the remark, as well as some of Ned’s quips that had preceded it, and had been almost unable to believe her ears. It was not that she was particularly ingenuous or innocent. As an employee in a great factory she had a knowledge of life beyond any that these two tenderly bred women could have hoped to gain. But always before she had associated such speech with ill-bred and vulgar people with whom she would not permit herself to associate, never with those who in their attitude and thought presumed to be infinitely her superior.
She was not lacking in good sense; so she gave no sign of having heard. She wondered, however, just how she would have received such sallies had she been properly a member of their party. Wholly independent, with a world of moral courage to support her convictions, she could not have joined in the laughter that followed, even to avoid being conspicuous. It would have been a situation of real embarrassment to her.
The conclusion that she came to was that her three months’ journey on board the Charon would be beset with many complications.
She made the very sensible resolve to avoid Ned’s society and that of his two guests just as much as possible. She saw at once they were not her kind of people; and only unpleasantness would result from her intercourse with them.
She couldn’t explain the darkening of her mood that followed this resolve. Surely she did not lean on these three for her happiness: the journey itself offered enough in the way of adventure and pleasure. She anticipated hours of enjoyment with Knutsen, the Norse pilot and owner of the boat, with McNab, the freckled, sandy-haired first engineer, and with Forest, his young assistant. Yet the weight of unhappiness that descended upon her was only too real. She tried in vain to shake it off. A sensible, self-mastered girl, she hated to yield to an oppression that seemingly had its source in her imagination only.
Ned had seemed so fine, so cheery, so companionable the night he had taken her home, after the accident. Yet he was showing himself a weakling: she saw the signs of it too plainly to mistake. She saw him not only on a far different social plane from her own, but some way fallen in her respect. He was separated from her not only by the unstable barrier of caste but by the stone wall of standards. She knew life, this girl of the world of toil, and she seemed to know that all her half-glimpsed, intangible dreams had come to nothing.
And her decision to avoid the three aristocrats stood her in good stead before the night was done, saving her as bitter a moment as any that had oppressed her in all the steep path of her life. Just after the dinner call had sounded, Lenore, Ned, and Mrs. Hardenworth had had a momentous conference in the little dining saloon.