“There is the glassy sea,” replied the gardener, recovering. “And the halo is just flowering. It is exactly the colour of your hair.”
“I hope the sea will be as you say,” said Courtesy, “for I’m a shockin’ bad sailor.”
And at that moment the sea ceased to be totally glassy. You could suddenly feel the slow passionate heart of the sea beating.
Courtesy did not look at the change in this poetic light at all. She hurried along the deck and disappeared.
Even if you are a good sailor there is, apart from a natural pride in your sailorship, little joy about a first day on board. The climate of the English seas is not adapted to ocean travel. If I could steam straight out of Southampton Harbour into the strong yet restrained heat that I love, if I could glide from the wharf—mottled with regrets—straight to the silver and emerald coasts of a certain land I know, where the cocoanut palms lean out over the strip of immaculate sand, to see their reflections in the opal mirror of the sea, I think I should love the first day as much as I love its successors. And yet I would not have the voyage shortened by a minute.
I wonder why nobody has ever brought forward as a conclusive Anti-suffrage argument the fact that more women are sea-sick than men on the first day of a sea-voyage. I can so well imagine the superb line the logic of such a contention would take. If the basis of life is physical ability, and if physical ability depends upon the digestion, then must the strong digestion only constitute a right to citizenship. To the wall with the weak digestion.
Mrs. Paul Rust and the suffragette were the only women who scaled the heights of the dining saloon for that evening’s meal. Mrs. Rust looked supremely proud of her immunity from sea-sickness; all the men looked laboriously unaware that such a thing as sea-sickness existed; the suffragette looked frankly miserable. The gardener was obliged to remind himself casually from time to time that there was no pose that included sea-sickness.
But any disastrous tendency he might have had to give too much thought to his inner man was checked by the appearance of Mrs. Paul Rust, the fortress he was there to besiege. She was a truly remarkable woman to look at. The absence of her hat revealed a surprise. Her hair was dyed a forcible crimson. And it might have been mud-coloured like mine for all the self-consciousness she showed. It was so profoundly remarkable that for a time one’s attention was chained to the hair, and one forgot to study the impressive general effect, of which the hair was only the culminating point. Mrs. Rust’s only real feature was her chin, but no one ever realised this. Her eyes and nose were too small for her face, and seemed to fit loosely into that great oval; her mouth was only redeemed by the chin that shot from beneath it. Altogether she would have been sufficiently insignificant-looking had it not been for her hair. She proved the truism that the world takes people at their own valuation.
It is always a surprise to me when a truism is proved true. I have come across the rock embedded in these truisms several times lately to my cost. And each time it bruises my knuckles and shocks me. It almost makes one wonder whether, after all, the ancients occasionally had their flashes of enlightenment.
The world thought of Mrs. Paul Rust what she thought of herself. It is so often too busy to work out its own conclusions.