“You have been in Columbus lately?” she was saying.  “No, you needn’t tell me about it,” with a sigh.  “Why is it, Caroline, that there is so little of my life I would be willing to live over again?  So little that I can even think of without depression.  Yet I’ve really not such a bad conscience.  It may mean that I still belong to the future more than to the past, do you think?”

My assent was not warm enough to fix her attention, and she went on thoughtfully:  “Of course, it was a bleak country and a bleak period.  But I’ve sometimes wondered whether the bleakness may not have been in me, too; for it has certainly followed me.  There, that is no way to talk!” she drew herself up from a momentary attitude of dejection.  “Sea air always lets me down at first.  That’s why it’s so good for me in the end.”

“I think Julia always lets you down, too,” I said bluntly.  “But perhaps that depression works out in the same way.”

Cressida laughed.  “Julia is rather more depressing than Georgie, isn’t she?  But it was Julia’s turn.  I can’t come alone, and they’ve grown to expect it.  They haven’t, either of them, much else to expect.”

At this point the deck steward approached us with a blue envelope.  “A wireless for you, Madame Garnet.”

Cressida put out her hand with impatience, thanked him graciously, and with every indication of pleasure tore open the blue envelope.  “It’s from Jerome Brown,” she said with some confusion, as she folded the paper small and tucked it between the buttons of her close-fitting gown, “Something he forgot to tell me.  How long shall you be in London?  Good; I want you to meet him.  We shall probably be married there as soon as my engagements are over.”  She rose.  “Now I must write some letters.  Keep two places at your table, so that I can slip away from my party and dine with you sometimes.”

I walked with her toward her chair, in which Mr. Poppas was now reclining.  He indicated his readiness to rise, but she shook her head and entered the door of her deck suite.  As she passed him, his eye went over her with assurance until it rested upon the folded bit of blue paper in her corsage.  He must have seen the original rectangle in the steward’s hand; having found it again, he dropped back between Horace and Miss Julia, whom I think he disliked no more than he did the rest of the world.  He liked Julia quite as well as he liked me, and he liked me quite as well as he liked any of the women to whom he would be fitfully agreeable upon the voyage.  Once or twice, during each crossing, he did his best and made himself very charming indeed, to keep his hand in,—­for the same reason that he kept a dummy keyboard in his stateroom, somewhere down in the bowels of the boat.  He practised all the small economies; paid the minimum rate, and never took a deck chair, because, as Horace was usually in the cardroom, he could sit in Horace’s.