in her steamer chair, and left her to make out the history and the
character of the people from it. In this sort of conjecture long
experience had taught him his futility, and he strolled up and down and
looked at the life about him with no wish to penetrate it deeply.

Long Island was now a low yellow line on the left. Some fishing-boats
flickered off the shore; they met a few sail, and left more behind; but
already, and so near one of the greatest ports of the world, the spacious
solitude of the ocean was beginning. There was no swell; the sea lay
quite flat, with a fine mesh of wrinkles on its surface, and the sun
flamed down upon it from a sky without a cloud. With the light fair wind,
there was no resistance in the sultry air, the thin, dun smoke from the
smoke-stack fell about the decks like a stifling veil.

The promenades, were as uncomfortably crowded as the sidewalk of
Fourteenth Street on a summer's day, and showed much the social average
of a New York shopping thoroughfare. Distinction is something that does
not always reveal itself at first sight on land, and at sea it is still
more retrusive. A certain democracy of looks and clothes was the most
notable thing to March in the apathetic groups and detached figures. His
criticism disabled the saloon passengers of even so much personal appeal
as he imagined in some of the second-cabin passengers whom he saw across
their barrier; they had at least the pathos of their exclusion, and he
could wonder if they felt it or envied him. At Hoboken he had seen
certain people coming on board who looked like swells; but they had now
either retired from the crowd, or they had already conformed to the
prevailing type. It was very well as a type; he was of it himself; but he
wished that beauty as well as distinction had not been so lost in it.

In fact, he no longer saw so much beauty anywhere as he once did. It