"No." To the fanciful girl the monosyllable came like one toll from a low tower. She laughed.
"Basile says there's another thing you suffer from."
"'Suffer'? From what do I 'suffer'?"
"From everybody else on the boat having a better chance to do things—big things—than you have."
He smiled again. "If I did, no one should know it; least of all you."
She ignored the last clause. "Aha! I said so. I told him—and mammy Joy told him—there's nothing bigger than to wait your turn and then take it. And there ain't—there isn't, is there?"
"Well—even that can be small. Nothing a man is big enough for looks big to him."
"Hoh!—after he's done it," laughed Ramsey.
"True—" said Hugh reflectively, "or suffered it," and both of them began to see that we can rarely lift more than our one corner of the whole truth at a time. "In your way," he added, still musing, "you're larger than I."
"Oh, I'm no—such—thing!" Her speech was soft, yet she looked up warily to Watson's pilot-house window, but Watson too thoroughly approved to be looking down. "I'm not half or third or quarter as large." She eagerly turned his attention up the river. Visible only by the lights of her cabin and the sparks from her unseen chimneys, a boat was coming round the next bend. As she entered the reach and breasted the breeze which so calmly accompanied the Votaress, her two spangled plumes of smoke swept straight astern as if two comets raced with her, or——