They must be used to a good deal of American joking which they do not
understand, in the foreign steamship offices. The clerk turned
unsmilingly to one of his superiors and asked him some question in German
which March could not catch, perhaps because it formed no part of a
conversation with a barber, a bootmaker or a banker. A brief drama
followed, and then the clerk pointed to a room on the plan of the
Norumbia and said it had just been given up, and they could have it if
they decided to take it at once.

They looked, and it was in the very place of their room on the Colmannia;
it was within one of being the same number. It was so providential, if it
was providential at all, that they were both humbly silent a moment; even
Mrs. March was silent. In this supreme moment she would not prompt her
husband by a word, a glance, and it was from his own free will that he
said, "We will take it."

He thought it was his free will, but perhaps one's will is never free;
and this may have been an instance of pure determinism from all the
events before it. No event that followed affected it, though the day
after they had taken their passage on the Norumbia he heard that she had
once been in the worst sort of storm in the month of August. He felt
obliged to impart the fact to his wife, but she said that it proved
nothing for or against the ship, and confounded him more by her reason
than by all her previous unreason. Reason is what a man is never prepared
for in women; perhaps because he finds it so seldom in men.




V.