whispering silk, her grandfather's rotund tones, Laurel and Camilla and
her mother, were distant, immaterial. In the evening she sat on the
front steps, a web of white, dreamily intent on the shimmering sweep of
Washington Square. After a little she was joined by Gerrit Ammidon. He
wore linen trousers and a short blue sea jacket; and the wavering
delicately lavender trail of smoke from his cheroot was like her
floating thoughts.

"Already," he said, "I am full of getting back on my ship."

She smiled at him absently.

"The land doesn't do for a sailor," he continued. "They are always into
trouble on shore. I can't say why it should be so but it is. If there's
not one kind there is another; rum and such varnish for the able seaman,
and--and complications for a master. I suppose that's because there are
so confounded many unexpected currents and slants of wind, as you might
say. On shipboard everything pretty much is charted; a thing will be
followed more or less by a fixed consequence. The waves break so and so
on coral or rocks or sand; there is usually the sun for an observation;
a good man knows his ship, how many points she'll hold on the wind, how
a cargo must be stowed, when to take in the light canvas. You can give
the man at the wheel a course and turn in or stay on deck and beat your
way through hell. It's exact, you know, but on shore--" he made a
hopeless gesture.

"There are no regulations," he observed moodily; "or else nobody follows
them: collisions all the time, sinkings and derelicts drifting round,
awash and dismasted. But they are everywhere. That fellow, Edward
Dunsack--" he stopped, lost in speculation. Then, "He seems harmless