“Oh, I don’t know.  People will say anything about any boat.  You know she broke her shaft, once, and once she got caught in the ice.”

Mrs. March joined him in deriding the superstition of people, and she parted gayly with this over-good young couple.  As soon as they were gone, March knew that she would say:  “You must change that ticket, my dear.  We will go in the Norumbia.”

“Suppose I can’t get as good a room on the Norumbia?”

“Then we must stay.”

In the morning after a night so bad that it was worse than no night at all, she said she would go to the steamship office with him and question them up about the Colmannia.  The people there had never heard she was called an unlucky boat; they knew of nothing disastrous in her history.  They were so frank and so full in their denials, and so kindly patient of Mrs. March’s anxieties, that he saw every word was carrying conviction of their insincerity to her.  At the end she asked what rooms were left on the Norumbia, and the clerk whom they had fallen to looked through his passenger list with a shaking head.  He was afraid there was nothing they would like.

“But we would take anything,” she entreated, and March smiled to think of his innocence in supposing for a moment that she had ever dreamed of not going.

“We merely want the best,” he put in.  “One flight up, no noise or dust, with sun in all the windows, and a place for fire on rainy days.”

They must be used to a good deal of American joking which they do not understand, in the foreign steamship offices.  The clerk turned unsmilingly to one of his superiors and asked him some question in German which March could not catch, perhaps because it formed no part of a conversation with a barber, a bootmaker or a banker.  A brief drama followed, and then the clerk pointed to a room on the plan of the Norumbia and said it had just been given up, and they could have it if they decided to take it at once.

They looked, and it was in the very place of their room on the Colmannia; it was within one of being the same number.  It was so providential, if it was providential at all, that they were both humbly silent a moment; even Mrs. March was silent.  In this supreme moment she would not prompt her husband by a word, a glance, and it was from his own free will that he said, “We will take it.”

He thought it was his free will, but perhaps one’s will is never free; and this may have been an instance of pure determinism from all the events before it.  No event that followed affected it, though the day after they had taken their passage on the Norumbia he heard that she had once been in the worst sort of storm in the month of August.  He felt obliged to impart the fact to his wife, but she said that it proved nothing for or against the ship, and confounded him more by her reason than by all her previous unreason.  Reason is what a man is never prepared for in women; perhaps because he finds it so seldom in men.