Mrs. Nettlepoint was at home: I found her in her back drawing-room, where
the wide windows opened to the water. The room was dusky--it was too hot
for lamps--and she sat slowly moving her fan and looking out on the
little arm of the sea which is so pretty at night, reflecting the lights
of Cambridgeport and Charlestown. I supposed she was musing on the loved
ones she was to leave behind, her married daughters, her grandchildren;
but she struck a note more specifically Bostonian as she said to me,
pointing with her fan to the Back Bay: "I shall see nothing more charming
than that over there, you know!" She made me very welcome, but her son
had told her about the _Patagonia_, for which she was sorry, as this
would mean a longer voyage. She was a poor creature in any boat and
mainly confined to her cabin even in weather extravagantly termed fine--as
if any weather could be fine at sea.

"Ah then your son's going with you?" I asked.

"Here he comes, he'll tell you for himself much better than I can pretend
to." Jasper Nettlepoint at that moment joined us, dressed in white
flannel and carrying a large fan. "Well, my dear, have you decided?" his
mother continued with no scant irony. "He hasn't yet made up his mind,
and we sail at ten o'clock!"

"What does it matter when my things are put up?" the young man said.
"There's no crowd at this moment; there will be cabins to spare. I'm
waiting for a telegram--that will settle it. I just walked up to the
club to see if it was come--they'll send it there because they suppose
this house unoccupied. Not yet, but I shall go back in twenty minutes."

"Mercy, how you rush about in this temperature!" the poor lady exclaimed
while I reflected that it was perhaps _his_ billiard-balls I had heard