"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."