I’ve forgotten what I said, but it was just as good.
The light—standing, they told me, on Fire Island—winked at us repeatedly, unaware, perhaps, that we were all married. I’ll confess we didn’t mind at all and would have winked back if we could have winked hard enough to carry nineteen nautical miles.
Ring Once was waiting at the stateroom door to tell me to have all baggage packed and outside first thing in the morning.
“I’ll see that it’s taken off the ship,” he said. “You’ll find it under your initial on the dock.”
“What do you mean, under my initial?”
He explained and then noticed that my junk was unlabeled. I’d worried over this a long while. My French Line stickers had not stuck. And how would New Yorkers and Chicagoans know I’d been abroad? I couldn’t stop each one and tell him.
The trusty steward disappeared and soon returned with four beautiful labels, square, with a red border, a white star in the middle, and a dark blue L, meaning me, in the middle of the star.
“Put those on so they’ll stay,” I instructed him. “There’s no sense in crossing the ocean and then keeping it a secret.”
Tuesday, October 2. A Regular Hotel.
M. de M. Hanson, looking as if he’d had just as much sleep as I, was in his, or somebody else’s deck chair, reading a yesterday’s New York paper, when I emerged to greet the dawn.