“Oh, pretty enough, yes,” replied Staniford. “Nothing is so common as the pretty girl of our nation. Her beauty is part of the general tiresomeness of the whole situation.”
“Don't you think,” ventured his friend, further, “that she has rather a lady-like air?”
“She wanted to know,” said Staniford, with a laugh.
Dunham was silent a while before he asked, “What do you suppose her first name is?”
“Jerusha, probably.”
“Oh, impossible!”
“Well, then,—Lurella. You have no idea of the grotesqueness of these people's minds. I used to see a great deal of their intimate life when I went on my tramps, and chanced it among them, for bed and board, wherever I happened to be. We cultivated Yankees and the raw material seem hardly of the same race. Where the Puritanism has gone out of the people in spots, there's the rankest growth of all sorts of crazy heresies, and the old scriptural nomenclature has given place to something compounded of the fancifulness of story-paper romance and the gibberish of spiritualism. They make up their names, sometimes, and call a child by what sounds pretty to them. I wonder how the captain picked up that scoundrel.”
The turn of Staniford's thought to Hicks was suggested by the appearance of Captain Jenness, who now issued from the cabin gangway, and came toward them with the shadow of unwonted trouble in his face. The captain, too, was smoking.
“Well, gentlemen,” he began, with the obvious indirectness of a man not used to diplomacy, “how do you like your accommodations?”
Staniford silently acquiesced in Dunham's reply that they found them excellent. “But you don't mean to say,” Dunham added, “that you're going to give us beefsteak and all the vegetables of the season the whole way over?”