"Are you game, Miriam? Are you, darling—eh, Miriam, eh?"
"Yes, Irving."
* * * * *
Alongside her pier, white as a gull, new painted, new washed, cargoed and stoked, the Roumania reared three red smoke-stacks, and sat proudly with the gang-plank flung out from her mighty hip and her nose tapering toward the blue harbor and the blue billows beyond.
Within the narrow confines of a first-deck stateroom, piled round with luggage and its double-decker berths freshly made up, Mrs. Binswanger applied an anxious eye to the port-hole, straining tiptoe for a wider glimpse of deck.
"I tell you this much, papa, in another five minutes when that child don't come, right away off the boat I get and go home where I belong."
In the act of browsing among the lower contents of his wicker hand-bag
Mr. Binswanger raised a perspiring face.
"Na, na, mamma, thirty minutes' time yet she's got to get here.
Everybody don't got to come on four hours too soon like us."
"Ja, you should worry about anything, so long as you got right in front of you your newspapers and your tobacco. Right away for his tobacco he has to dig when he sees so worried I am I can't see. Why don't our Ray come back now if she can't find 'em and say she can't find 'em?"
"I tell you, Carrie, if you let me go myself I can find 'em and—"