"Why the devil didn't you?" Willie snapped.
"They ask five thousand dollars for it."
Even Willie winced at this. "I don't want it for a year," he groaned. "Just one voyage."
"It has a private deck, a drawing-room, two bath-rooms, two servants' rooms—"
The "private deck" decided Willie; but when he told Persis he laid stress on the price he paid; not from any braggart motive, but as a pathetic sort of courtship.
Persis smiled a little. It was something. But when she found the private deck she took pains to invite other passengers she knew to make it their own piazza. Among the passengers were Mrs. Neff and Alice.
After Persis had thwarted Alice's elopement with Stowe Webb the boy had been tempted to go to Mrs. Neff and plead with her to withdraw her ban, seeing that he was now a man of affairs with an assured income. But he imagined what she would say when she asked him the amount of that income; and he imagined her smile. She did not have to ridicule his fortune. The sum itself was so petty that it ridiculed itself.
He and Alice had met clandestinely a few times at the houses of friends, but both were young and both were timid, and their friends were cynical with discouragement. Alice wanted to go to watch him off at the dock, but had not dared, and only sent him a tear-blotted steamer letter. And while he was down in his state-room reading it she was locked in her pink-and-white virginal chamber crying her blue eyes crimson on her bed. She never spoke of him to her mother, and Mrs. Neff did not know what had become of him.
So the two child-lovers pined away. New York became a deserted village to Alice, and Stowe found the ocean a congenial waste, for he felt in his breast an Atlantic loneliness. Nor was Paris less sad; its allurements were only thorns; he felt that he must be true to his little wife-to-be, and it seemed that even to indulge in the more innocent gaieties would belie his desolation.