Alice Lauder/Part 1/Chapter 2

IT happened that the “Suez” had great good fortune in her homeward trip on this occasion. Day after day passed by in a robe of pale diaphanous turquoise, a cool, milky haze on the horizon the only shadow of cloud. Peacefully the ship climbed up the same blue hill day after day, and night after night, a smooth breeze meeting her as she moved, and giving some life to the lotus-eater’s paradise of the travellers. But there was literally nothing to do, and very little to think of.

The prestige of Lady May’s position rather weighed on the more plebeian sort, and few of these had the energy either to quarrel or to make love under those long, cold grey eyes, and longer, colder nose. Little was seen of the new passenger at first. She seemed to find her own resources sufficient for herself, and spent most ​of her time in reading, or making notes in a cramped musical notation in a shabby notebook. By degrees, however, her shyness wore off, and her personality began to make itself felt. The captain, a kindly, courteous gentleman of the old school (of which there are so few pupils left), always conscientiously divided his attentions to a hairbreadth (according to precedence) among his passengers; and he made a point of looking after Miss Lauder. Не was rather aghast at finding that she knew no one on board, and had not even been committed to his experienced care. Casting about for a suitable chaperon, he selected a large, broad-featured matron, “by the name of Wigs,” who, in a panoply of steel beads and whalebone, which would have defended Minerva herself, sat all day long in a painfully upright position, knitting from her elbows, and gazing benevolently over the ocean. Mrs. Wigs was charmed to take the young lady under her protecting wing; and for the rest of the voyage she sat, clothed in a little brief authority and a great deal of brown moiré, as near as possible to her young charge, listening with evident enjoyment to the conversation about her, but taking no part in it. By degrees, too, one or two others joined in, under Mrs. Wigs’ matronly and protecting shadow. The funny ​man of the ship (every mail steamer has an amateur jester on board, as necessary as the sail-maker) soon learned to turn his melancholy close-shaven countenance towards her as often as he launched a joke, and never failed to meet an answering sparkle of amusement from under her long black eyelashes. Lady May always looked down her nose—no small distance, by the way—whenever this vulgar person tried to be facetious, and he hated her in return with a vulgar and vivacious hatred. Then one after another of the waifs and strays of travelling life, people who drift about from one place to another out of pure inanity, and who bore each other to death with their stories of hotels and railways, fastened themselves on Miss Lauder’s neighbourhood, delighted to find a new victim, and poured out endless moving incidents of tables d’hôte and excursion trains, of the price of tickets, the crimes of stewards, the loss of snippets of lace, or disappearances of silver ornaments from their persons, to her sympathetic and intelligent ear.

Lady May meanwhile remained serenely contemptuous of the lower depths of society, even on this little ark of existence that passed so bravely from one continent to the other. Absorbed in her own superiority, and accompanied by her silent, handsome friend, she lounged on ​the bamboo chairs, or walked the deck with that superb air of self-satisfaction which only an Englishwoman of a certain rank, supported by a lifetime of cold baths, High Church services, Parisian corset-makers, and invitations to Court, can possibly command; and, in addition, she had the moral support of finding the best-looking man on board completely at her service—so far.