“Of course it wouldn’t. I should think you’d know as much as that,” said Lottie, out of patience with him.
“But a minister isn’t always marrying or burying people; and in the intervals, why shouldn’t he be setting them an example of harmless cheerfulness?”
“He ought to be thinking more about the other world, I should say.”
“Well, if he believes there is another world—”
“Why! Don’t you?” she broke out on him.
Mr. Breckon ruled himself and continued—“as strenuously and unquestionably as he ought, he has greater reason than other men for gayety through his faith in a happier state of being than this. That’s one of the reasons I use against myself when I think of leaving off laughing. Now, Miss Kenton,” he concluded, “for such a close and slippery nature, I think I’ve been pretty frank,” and he looked round and down into her face with a burst of laughter that could be heard an the other side of the ship. He refused to take up any serious topic after that, and he returned to his former amusement of making her give herself away.
That night Lottie came to her room with an expression so decisive in her face that Ellen, following it with vague, dark eyes as it showed itself in the glass at which her sister stood taking out the first dismantling hairpins before going to bed, could not fail of something portentous in it.
“Well,” said Lottie, with severe finality, “I haven’t got any use for THAT young man from this time out. Of all the tiresome people, he certainly takes the cake. You can have him, Ellen, if you want him.”
“What’s the matter with him?” asked Ellen, with a voice in sympathy with the slow movement of her large eyes as she lay in her berth, staring at Lottie.
“There’s everything the matter, that oughtn’t to be. He’s too trivial for anything: I like a man that’s serious about one thing in the universe, at least, and that’s just what Mr. Breckon isn’t.” She went at such length into his disabilities that by the time she returned to the climax with which she started she was ready to clamber into the upper berth; and as she snapped the electric button at its head she repeated, “He’s trivial.”