'Of course not! I only joined her for this voyage. I have to work my passage, you see, and Providence, on the eve of sailing, robbed Mrs. Wilhammer of her maid.'
'Oh!' he murmured in relief. His red-haired muse was going back to her social pedestal. 'But you must have found it humiliating,' he said.
'Humiliating?' She laughed cheerfully. 'Why more than manicuring her?'
The muse shivered again on the pedestal.
'Manicuring?' he echoed in dismay.
'Sure!' she laughed in American. 'When, after a course of starvation and medicine at Berne University, I found I had to get a new degree for America....'
'You are a doctor?' he interrupted.
'And, therefore, peculiarly serviceable as a ship-maid.'
She smiled again, and her smile in the moonlight reminded him of a rippling passage of Chopin. Prosaic enough, however, was what she went on to tell him of her struggle for life by day and for learning by night. 'Of course, I could only attend the night medical school. I lived by lining cloaks with fur; my bed was the corner of a room inhabited by a whole family. A would-be graduate could not be seen with bundles; for fetching and carrying the work my good landlady extorted twenty cents to the dollar. When the fur season was slack I cooked in a restaurant, worked a typewriter, became a "hello girl"—at a telephone, you know—reported murder cases—anything, everything.'
'Manicuring,' he recalled tenderly.