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a basket of flora transported from the gardens of four continents to rot in my stateroom. Either I was being secretly watched or the stuff was growing out of the wall.
    Once, however, I became accustomed to the admiration implicit in the presentation of these baskets, it was a back-hand slap when one basket showed up definitely short one kumquat. Let the chef collar the clown who perpetrated this cruel mockery or come in and be flogged himself, was my thinking. Yes, and be damned to the cowardly rabble traveling second and third class over my strictly first-class sea.
    Had I only been able to sustain this high-wheeling mood I might have qualified as a literary critic for Partisan Review or a mutuel clerk at a fifty-dollar window. I might even have been able to hold both jobs. Presentable people are needed in both these lines. But the mood was melted by the strains, faint yet clear, of Meyer Davis’s orchestra swinging Drink, Drink, Drink to Old Heidelberg —it was teatime in the cocktail bar and teatime in the lounge! Teatime in the powder room and in the hearts of men! Who can hold bitterness in his heart when music like that comes along?
    Oh, good for you, Kindly Meyer Davis and your kindly orchestra, I thought, and hurried to the lounge.
    I loved that lounge because it was there that the most right-thinking people aboard were to be found, drinking tea as the evening sun went down. I didn’t even mind when that evening sun sank. Because then the
lights came up and I could see them all better. In fact, I was so moved by the consciousness of being among these great-souled men and women that, when the music stopped, I planted myself directly beneath the orchestra.
    â€œAs for Meyer Davis’s orchestra,” I announced, “I say hurrah!”
    The ladies joined me in three rousing cheers for Meyer Davis, and I retired, confident that Mr. Davis was pleased to have found so frank an admirer aboard his ship.
    Â 
    Everyone wanted to know, in a sort of teatime huff, What is she so quiet about? Why don’t she say something? Why they figured the poor broad should make more noise than anyone else because she was a duchess I couldn’t quite catch.
    But there she’d be, evening after evening, waiting for the duke to finish his creamed spinach so she could get started on her sirloin. The duke had had his quota of sirloins by the time she was born and must have been over the hill before. Now only God and creamed spinach were keeping him pasted together.
    But for some reason he didn’t want to actually fall apart till he was eighty-two. If he had more than three days to go his reasoning was faulty.
    Nobody held the duke’s extreme age against him but myself. It was the little broad that had the nerve to sit there as if she wasn’t yet thirty, when everyone knew she was every day of thirty-four, that made the ladies so salty. Myself, I didn’t dare to say she hardly looked twenty-six.
    In fact, I approved of the match from her standpoint, which seemed to be the only tenable one. What was the difference who spooned spinach to the duke the last week before he was buried? was how I felt. Either he had had it or he hadn’t; and if he hadn’t, not even Meyer Davis could help him. If I pulled a chair up beside hers to ask, “Baby, exactly what are your plans?” it would show her whose side I was on. But I never got around to it, being too diverted by the carryings-on of my own table.
    At the head of it, in full command, was a seagoing Fatty Arbuckle, a ship’s officer who looked like he lived on gold braid and some of the threads had caught on his sleeves. Since he was at the head and I was at the foot, there was no chance of pasting him one without knocking over the flowers. He took an immediate liking to me too.
    â€œTry the gin-ger, it’s tan -gy.” Fatty would recommend a dish of sweets to Mrs. Di Santos, and then leave his mouth hanging, tongue thrust into
his