graceful lines of it. She and her dress together reminded him of women
on the stage. Then he remembered seeing similar grand ladies and gowns
entering the London theatres while he stood and watched and the policemen
shoved him back into the drizzle beyond the awning. Next his mind leaped
to the Grand Hotel at Yokohama, where, too, from the sidewalk, he had
seen grand ladies. Then the city and the harbor of Yokohama, in a
thousand pictures, began flashing before his eyes. But he swiftly
dismissed the kaleidoscope of memory, oppressed by the urgent need of the
present. He knew that he must stand up to be introduced, and he
struggled painfully to his feet, where he stood with trousers bagging at
the knees, his arms loose-hanging and ludicrous, his face set hard for
the impending ordeal.




CHAPTER II


The process of getting into the dining room was a nightmare to him.
Between halts and stumbles, jerks and lurches, locomotion had at times
seemed impossible. But at last he had made it, and was seated alongside
of Her. The array of knives and forks frightened him. They bristled
with unknown perils, and he gazed at them, fascinated, till their dazzle
became a background across which moved a succession of forecastle
pictures, wherein he and his mates sat eating salt beef with
sheath-knives and fingers, or scooping thick pea-soup out of pannikins by
means of battered iron spoons. The stench of bad beef was in his
nostrils, while in his ears, to the accompaniment of creaking timbers and
groaning bulkheads, echoed the loud mouth-noises of the eaters. He