refuges as the ship's architecture afforded, or submitted to be pushed
and twirled about by the surging throng when they got in its way. She
pitied these in their affliction, which she perceived that they could not
lighten or shorten, but she had no patience with the young girls, who
broke into shrieks of nervous laughter at the coming of certain young
men, and kept laughing and beckoning till they made the young men see
them; and then stretched their hands to them and stood screaming and
shouting to them across the intervening heads and shoulders. Some girls,
of those whom no one had come to bid good-by, made themselves merry, or
at least noisy, by rushing off to the dining-room and looking at the
cards on the bouquets heaping the tables, to find whether any one had
sent them flowers. Others whom young men had brought bunches of violets
hid their noses in them, and dropped their fans and handkerchiefs and
card-cases, and thanked the young men for picking them up. Others, had
got places in the music-room, and sat there with open boxes of
long-stemmed roses in their laps, and talked up into the faces of the
men, with becoming lifts and slants of their eyes and chins. In the midst
of the turmoil children struggled against people's feet and knees, and
bewildered mothers flew at the ship's officers and battered them with
questions alien to their respective functions as they amiably stifled
about in their thick uniforms.

Sailors, slung over the ship's side on swinging seats, were placidly
smearing it with paint at that last moment; the bulwarks were thickly set
with the heads and arms of passengers who were making signs to friends on
shore, or calling messages to them that lost themselves in louder noises
midway. Some of the women in the steerage were crying; they were probably
not going to Europe for pleasure like the first-cabin passengers, or even
for their health; on the wharf below March saw the face of one young girl
twisted with weeping, and he wished he had not seen it. He turned from