“Oh, Mr. Vandover!”
Vandover paused a moment, looking back.
“Where are you going?” she went on.
“Didn’t you see me here? Don’t
you want to come and talk to me?”
“No,” answered Vandover, smiling good-humouredly,
trying to be as polite as was possible. “No,
I don’t.” Then he took a sudden resolution,
and added gravely, “I don’t want to have
anything to do with you.”
In his stateroom, as he sat on the edge of his berth
winding his watch before going to bed, he thought
over what he had said. “That was a mean
way to talk to a girl,” he told himself, “but,”
he added, “it’s the only thing to do.
I simply couldn’t start in again after all that’s
happened. Oh, yes, that was the right thing to
do!”
He felt a glow of self-respect for his firmness and
his decision, a pride in the unexpected strength,
the fine moral rigour that he had developed at the
critical moment. He could turn sharp around
when he wanted to, after all. Ah, yes, that was
the only thing to do if one was to begin all over
again and live down what had happened. He wished
that the governor might know how well he had acted.
Vandover stayed for two weeks at Coronado Beach and
managed to pass the time very pleasantly. He
was fortunate enough to find a party at the hotel
whom he knew very well. In the morning they bathed
or sailed on the bay, and in the afternoon rode out
with a pack of greyhounds and coursed jack-rabbits
on the lower end of the island. Vandover’s
good spirits began to come back to him, his appetite
returned, his nerves steadied themselves, he slept
eight hours every night. But for all that he
did not think that things were the same with him.
He said to himself that he was a changed man; that
he was older, more serious.
During this time he received several letters from
his father which he answered very promptly. In
the course of their correspondence it was arranged
that they should both leave for Europe on the twenty-fifth
of that month, and that consequently, Vandover should
return to the city not later than the fifteenth.
Vandover was having such a good time, however, that
he stayed over the regular steamer in order to go upon
a moonlight picnic down on the beach. The next
afternoon he took passage for San Francisco on a second-class
boat.
This homeward passage turned out to be one long misery
for Vandover. He had never been upon a second-class
boat before and had never imagined that anything could
be so horribly uncomfortable or disagreeable.
The Mazatlan was overcrowded, improperly ballasted,
and rolled continually. The table was bad, the
accommodations inadequate, the passengers hopelessly
uncongenial. Cold and foggy weather accompanied
the boat continually. The same endless procession
of bleached hills still filed past under the mist,
going now in the opposite direction, and the same
interminable game of whist was played in the smoking-room,
only with greasier, second-class cards, amidst the
acrid smoke of second-class tobacco. At supper,
the first day out, a little Jew who sat next to Vandover,
and who invariably wore a plush skull-cap with ear-laps,
tried to sell him two flawed and yellow diamonds.
