Stasia hadn’t, Cynthia thought, much imagination, but perhaps that was because her father was president of the line. Look at this suite de luxe, the best in the ship. And if she had never earned her own living she couldn’t imagine what it was to be like Miss Mitchall.
“Oh, she had some sort of a governess job. But she’s English you know, and she didn’t come in on the quota and so she had to go back home. She was with a Canadian family in Buffalo. They are paying her fare back, but that’s all. I wish ...” she stopped. She was going to say she wished she could help her.
Stasia looked at her watch, the little platinum watch circled with diamonds. “It’s six my dear, and dinner’s at half past seven. If you’re going to get your roommate into her costume ...”
“You’re right, you’re perfectly right.” Cynthia struggled into her wool dress, grabbed the black scarf, the buckled shoes, threw the blouse over her arm. “Here, give me a hand with the other stuff, will you? I’ll take the hat.”
Cynthia’s small cabin was down, down, two steep flights below the cabins de luxe. Clean white corridors smelling of soap and sea and ship, doors shut and white, doors open and dark, doors open and lighted, a narrow corridor turning down to the left, two doors facing each other, the left one always closed. Cynthia often wondered about that door. She knew the cabin was occupied because the room steward went in and out but no one else ever did. The door to the right was Cynthia’s and Miss Mitchall’s.
“Here we are. Thanks a lot. Can I help with make-up or anything?” Cynthia dumped her things on the bunk, turned on the lights.
“No, thanks. The stewardess and Lilia will help if I want it.” Lilia was Stasia’s maid. Cynthia smiled. Think of having a maid to yourself!
Stasia was gone. Cynthia hustled out of her dress again, turned on the hot water, whistled happily. This was going to be fun tonight. Like the old Art Academy days when everybody dressed up and the dances lasted till morning.
Someone in the cabin across the corridor coughed, a man’s cough. Cynthia turned off the hot water and listened, caught herself staring with wide gray eyes at the wide gray eyes in the mirror over the wash basin.
The night she had come on board that left hand door had been wide open and in the corridor there had been a suitcase, big and black, with lots of stickers on it. Cynthia hurrying along the hall with an arm full of last minute fruit and flowers and books, Chick and Judy and the others of the old Art School bunch at her heels, had tripped and fallen full length over that suitcase. When Chick had picked her up, unhurt, and brushed her off, she had noted the suitcase and a huge Ottawa Hotel paster on its side, bright with greens and blues and oranges. Chick had noticed it too. “A good poster design, that,” he had said.