He was in the enjoyment of his unmerited honor when a belated lady came with her husband for an evening call, before going into the country.  At sight of the plans of steamers on the Marches’ table, she expressed the greatest wonder and delight that they were going to Europe.  They had supposed everybody knew it, by this time, but she said she had not heard a word of it; and she went on with some felicitations which March found rather unduly filial.  In getting a little past the prime of life he did not like to be used with too great consideration of his years, and he did not think that he and his wife were so old that they need be treated as if they were going on a golden wedding journey, and heaped with all sorts of impertinent prophecies of their enjoying it so much and being so much the better for the little outing!  Under his breath, he confounded this lady for her impudence; but he schooled himself to let her rejoice at their going on a Hanseatic boat, because the Germans were always so careful of you.  She made her husband agree with her, and it came out that he had crossed several times on both the Colmannia and the Norumbia.  He volunteered to say that the Colmannia, was a capital sea-boat; she did not have her nose under water all the time; she was steady as a rock; and the captain and the kitchen were simply out of sight; some people did call her unlucky.

“Unlucky?” Mrs. March echoed, faintly.  “Why do they call her unlucky?”

“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.”