I turned away then, struggling fiercely with something in my throat, but just for an instant.
"Broken heart!" I repeated scornfully. "It's not that bad. You mustn't think I'm such a fool."
"Well," he said briskly, "whatever it is, cut it out! And, believe me, my dear, a steamer trunk is the best possible grave for unrequited love."
CHAPTER XV
THE JOURNEY
Personally, I am of such an impatient disposition that I can't bear to read a chapter in a book which begins: "Meanwhile——" Life is too short for meanwhiles! But, since the Oldburgh epoch of my career has passed, and the brilliant new epoch has a sea-voyage before it—and crossing the ocean is distinctly a "meanwhile" occupation—I have decided to mark time by taking extracts from my green leather voyage book, with the solid gold clasp and the pencil that won't write. (The city editor gave me the book.)
The first entry was made at the breakfast table in an unnecessarily smart New York hotel. That's one bad feature about having a newspaper pay your traveling expenses! You can't have the pleasure of indulging the vagabondage of your nature—as you can when you're traveling on your hook. The lonely little entry says:
"Hate New York! Always feel countrified and unpopular here!"
But the next one was much better. It reads:
"Love the sea, whose principal charm is the sky above it! The one acceptable fact about orthodox Heaven is that it's up in the sky. You couldn't endure it if it were in any closer quarters."
Yet between New York and Heaven there lay several unappreciated days—days when I sat for long hours facing strange faces and hearing a jumbled jargon about "barth" hours, deck chairs and miscarried roses. By the way, a strange trick of fate had filled my own bare little stateroom with flowers. I say a trick of fate, because some of them were for Pauline Calhoun, whose New York friends had heard of her proposed journey, but not of her accident, and some of them were addressed to me. I could understand the Pauline blossoms, but those directed to Miss Grace Christie were mystifying—very. But I accepted them with hearty thanks, and the time I spent wondering over them kept me from grieving over the fact that the Statue of Liberty was the only person on the horizon whose face I had ever seen before; and they kept me feeling like a prima donna for half a week.