He had known in Dresden an American family in which there were three
daughters who used to skate with the officers, and some of the
ladies now coming on board struck him as of that same habit, except
that in the Dresden days feathers weren't worn quite so high.

At last the ship began to creak and slowly bridge, and the delay at
Southampton came to an end. The gangway was removed and the vessel
indulged in the awkward evolutions that were to detach her from the
land. Count Vogelstein had finished his cigar, and he spent a long
time in walking up and down the upper deck. The charming English
coast passed before him, and he felt this to be the last of the old
world. The American coast also might be pretty--he hardly knew what
one would expect of an American coast; but he was sure it would be
different. Differences, however, were notoriously half the charm of
travel, and perhaps even most when they couldn't be expressed in
figures, numbers, diagrams or the other merely useful symbols. As
yet indeed there were very few among the objects presented to sight
on the steamer. Most of his fellow-passengers appeared of one and
the same persuasion, and that persuasion the least to be mistaken.
They were Jews and commercial to a man. And by this time they had
lighted their cigars and put on all manner of seafaring caps, some
of them with big ear-lappets which somehow had the effect of
bringing out their peculiar facial type. At last the new voyagers
began to emerge from below and to look about them, vaguely, with
that suspicious expression of face always to be noted in the newly
embarked and which, as directed to the receding land, resembles that
of a person who begins to perceive himself the victim of a trick.
Earth and ocean, in such glances, are made the subject of a sweeping
objection, and many travellers, in the general plight, have an air
at once duped and superior, which seems to say that they could