and Burnamy tried to infer him from it. He perceived a social quality in
his dress-coat case, capacious gladstone, hat-box, rug, umbrella, and
sole-leather steamer trunk which he could not attribute to his own
equipment. The things were not so new as his; they had an effect of
polite experience, with a foreign registry and customs label on them here
and there. They had been chosen with both taste and knowledge, and
Burnamy would have said that they were certainly English things, if it
had not been for the initials U. S. A. which followed the name of E. B.
Triscoe on the end of the steamer trunk showing itself under the foot of
the lower berth.

The lower berth had fallen to Burnamy through the default of the
passenger whose ticket he had got at the last hour; the clerk in the
steamer office had been careful to impress him with this advantage, and
he now imagined a trespass on his property. But he reassured himself by a
glance at his ticket, and went out to watch the ship's passage down the
stream and through the Narrows. After breakfast he came to his room
again, to see what could be done from his valise to make him look better
in the eyes of a girl whom he had seen across the table; of course he
professed a much more general purpose. He blamed himself for not having
got at least a pair of the white tennis-shoes which so many of the
passengers were wearing; his russet shoes had turned shabby on his feet;
but there was a, pair of enamelled leather boots in his bag which he
thought might do.

His room was in the group of cabins on the upper deck; he had already
missed his way to it once by mistaking the corridor which it opened into;
and he was not sure that he was not blundering again when he peered down
the narrow passage where he supposed it was. A lady was standing at an
open state-room door, resting her hands against the jambs and leaning