"O, nonsense, what prigs you are," interrupted Eric, "Mae is jolly. Do
stop your reasoning about her. If you are bound to be a potato yourself
to help save the masses from starvation, don't grumble because she grew
a flower. Come, let us go to lunch too."

Conversation was not always of this sort. One evening, not long after,
there was a moon, and Edith and Albert were missing. Eric was following
a blue-eyed girl along the deck, and Mae and Norman wandered off by
themselves up to this same hurricane deck again. The moonlight was
wonderful. It touched little groups here and there and fell full on the
face of a woman in the steerage, who sat with her arms crossed on her
knee and her face set eastward. She was singing, and her voice rose
clearly above the puff of the engine and the jabber below. There was a
chorus to the song, in which rough men and tired looking women joined.
The song was about home, and once in a while the girl unclasped her arms
and passed her hands over her eyes. Mae and Norman Mann looked at her
silently. "I suppose we don't know when we make pictures," said Mae.
"Don't we?" asked Norman pointedly. Mae looked very reprovingly out from
her white wraps at him, but he smiled back composedly and admiringly,
and drew her hand a trifle closer in his arm. And saucy Mae began to
feel in that sort of purring mood women come to when they drop the
bristling, ready-for-fight air with which they start on an acquaintance.
Perhaps, if the steamer had been a sailing-vessel, there would have
been no story to tell about Mae Madden, for a long line of evenings,
and girls singing songs, and hurricane decks by moonlight, are dangerous
things. But the vessel was a fast steamer, and was swiftly nearing land
again.