head steward seemed to understand as well as speak English, but the
table-stewards had only an effect of English, which they eked out with
"Bleace!" for all occasions of inquiry, apology, or reassurance, as the
equivalent of their native "Bitte!" Otherwise there was no reason to
suppose that they did not speak German, which was the language of a good
half of the passengers. The stewards looked English, however, in
conformity to what seems the ideal of every kind of foreign seafaring
people, and that went a good way toward making them intelligible.

March, to whom his wife mainly left their obeisance, made it so tentative
that if it should meet no response he could feel that it had been nothing
more than a forward stoop, such as was natural in sitting down. He need
not really have taken this precaution; those whose eyes he caught more or
less nodded in return.

A nice-looking boy of thirteen or fourteen, who had the place on the left
of the lady in the sofa seat under the port, bowed with almost
magisterial gravity, and made the lady on the sofa smile, as if she were
his mother and understood him. March decided that she had been some time
a widow; and he easily divined that the young couple on her right had
been so little time husband and wife that they would rather not have it
known. Next them was a young lady whom he did not at first think so
good-looking as she proved later to be, though she had at once a pretty
nose, with a slight upward slant at the point, long eyes under fallen
lashes, a straight forehead, not too high, and a mouth which perhaps the
exigencies of breakfasting did not allow all its characteristic charm.
She had what Mrs. March thought interesting hair, of a dull black,
roughly rolled away from her forehead and temples in a fashion not
particularly becoming to her, and she had the air of not looking so well
as she might if she had chosen. The elderly man on her right, it was easy