“Y-yes.” She looked at the unspeakably filthy deck, and tucked the skirts of her coat tighter round her.
“I see the good of a short skirt here,” Hildegarde’s eyes followed hers, “and it looks very nice on you, too.”
“I’m glad,” said the girl, “if you don’t think it’s too short.” Then she told Hildegarde about her life up in Alaska, how she had traveled, and cooked, and nursed, and hunted, and cured skins, and followed the trail; and did each and everything the better for wearing a skirt to the knee.
“But it’s hard after we’ve worked so, my aunt and me, to see men looking at us in that way as if they thought we were—were, you know, the wrong kind. Just because we try to adapt ourselves to the life.”
“Some people might not understand; but surely these men—”
With her head Ruth Sears made a little motion of negative. Slight as it was, it admitted no supposition of there being any doubt about the matter. “They’d rather we all wore trailing skirts and diamond ear-rings.”
“It’s really rather nice of them, in a way,” said Miss Mar.
But the one who had had the experience was less free to discover in the charge a survival of the starved spirit of romance. “That Mr. Tod,” Ruth went on, “he was up there last year. I’ve cooked him many a dinner. Only yesterday I heard him agreeing with a lot of men that he wouldn’t like to see his daughter going about in such a short dress, and all the while he was talking he was spitting on the deck.”
More here for the eye that could see than a base-mannered churl discussing feminine attire. He, in his way, was dealing with one of the important questions of the age. Also he had on his side many a learned and fastidious critic of society, for all that the great current of the future was set the other way. Some inkling of this last reached Hildegarde, and it reached her through a dawning sense of her own unfitness. She would never be in the vanguard with skirts kilted high for action. She was one of those who would cling to the outworn modes. For all that, she would for the rest of her life understand some things better because of these strange days in the microcosm of the ship.
While the third dinner was being cleared away, Hildegarde looked into the music-room. A dilapidated young woman, at the dilapidated piano, singing a comic song, and the cross-eyed man accompanying on the flute. A number of people sat about on the few rickety chairs and the many boxes and bundles, listening in a kind of painful trance, or passing back and forth over the wooden lattice of the raised flooring between which and the boards below escaped bilge-water slopped about with the motion of the ship and too frequently came to the surface.