"Tell her the girl is her devoted lover from afar, makes her a model in all things, and that we owe the agreeable modifications of the fair Posey's dress and manner exclusively to Miss Carstairs' example."
"That is a happy suggestion, and may accomplish good results. But did you ever know a man's eulogy of a woman effect anything with her own sex? It is generally successful only in confirming the worst predispositions, and in precipitating animosity where latent antipathy had sufficed. Still, who could resist the exquisite flattery of such imitation as our Posey's of Miss Carstairs? Fix your day for Beaumanoir, my dear chap. I consider our cause gained in advance."
"Do you know, Mariol," said Clandonald as the two men sat down at table, where the ladies had not yet arrived, "I have sometimes fancied that you yourself are getting rather under the spell of the young lady you have engaged to placate in Miss Winstanley's behalf."
"Do you know, Clan, that I never before suspected you of the imaginative gift? Nothing but Jonah's gourd—was it Jonah, and was it a gourd?—that grew up and withered in a night, could have had so little time allotted to its natural development, as a fancy by me for Miss Carstairs."
"That is no argument. I have read of love affairs beginning at the Statue of Liberty and culminating before the Gulf Stream was crossed. There is really no better medium than mid-Atlantic air for the growth of the tender passion. The leisure of a good voyage is like the forty years of Europe compared with the cycle of Cathay."
"It seems to me that you are exculpatory."
"I wish to heaven I might be!" exclaimed Clandonald, smothering his very genuine regret with a forkful of the roast beef of old England pastured upon Western plains.
The talk that morning with Posey Winstanley had awakened in him certain emotions of a simple elementary sort that, in spite of him, still twanged upon his heart-strings, pleasingly. He had, however, been by no means prepared for that upward glance of her childlike orbs when he had offered her his sympathy. While the normal vanity of the male creature thrilled in quickened interest in response to it, his judgment, his sense of responsibility, nay, of honor, called upon him loudly to let the thing go no further. A patent and audacious coquette on the surface, she was at heart a child who had as yet tasted no reality of sentiment for one of the dominant sex, and to whom such reality would inevitably come with extraordinary force.
The whimsicality of her having selected him—a battered plaything of the Fates, who did not want her, who could not indulge in her—for the object of a dawning first passion, struck him hard. He resolved to keep out of her way, and considered how he could have his meals elsewhere, or take to his bed for the remainder of the voyage. The projected luncheon at Beaumanoir should be carried out, and that done, he would have acquitted himself, en galant homme, of all that could be reasonably expected of a travelling Briton toward visiting Americans who had contributed to cheer his voyage across the Atlantic.
To begin the new order of things, he let himself be absorbed in conversation by Miss Bleecker, his pet aversion, who leaning over the table, her ample bosom begarlanded with chains and cords, each one sustaining some necessary implement for the aid of vision, far or near, and all of them entangled, was in her best spirits. She, Lady Channel Fleet, and Mrs. Vereker, had been in their deck chairs since broth and biscuits to the present moment, discussing the American women who had married into the British nobility. The three ancient heads cowled in veils and furry hoods—for the air off the Banks had had in it a tang of ice—had bobbed together during this time with a vivacity of movement suggesting the cinematograph.