"If I don't talk to somebody before that sun goes down I'll jump right over this railing," she explained. "Here's his picture!"
I took the small blue leather case and looked at the honest, rather distinguished face it held.
"But why should your parents disapprove of him?" I asked in such genuine surprise that she gave me a smile which sealed forever our friendship.
"They don't—really! It's just that they like to torment me because he happened not to be born in either New York or Kentucky. An Englishman's knowledge of America's excellence extends no further than that."
Night was coming on—and the sea looked pretty vast and unfriendly. It was the lonesome hour, when any feminine thing far away from home has to wax either confidential or tearful. Hilda was determined to be confidential, and I let her have her say. I went down, after a while, and dressed for dinner—listlessly and without heart, but when I went into the dining-room a little later and found my place at the table next the captain's, the geniality of the family atmosphere I found there was vastly cheering.
Mrs. Montgomery was a rather magnificent little gray-haired lady in gray satin and diamonds, and her husband had made the evolution from the chrysalis state into that of the butterfly by donning his dress clothes and putting up a monocle in place of the comfortable reading glasses he had worn in the afternoon. Hilda was wholesome and sweet-looking but quite secondary to her parents, in a soft blue gown.
The subject under discussion when I arrived was evidently the points of superiority of one American locality over another and they took me into their confidence at once.
"I appeal to you, Miss Christie, as an American," Mr. Montgomery said, after the steward who had acted as my pilot was out of hearing. "Shouldn't you think now—if you didn't know the difference—shouldn't you think now that a 'South Bender' was a species of acrobat?"
Then, try as hard as I might to keep all physical signs of my mental infirmity from cropping out in my log-book, the second evening out found an entry like this showing itself—written almost entirely without effort on my part—like "spirit writing":