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He was first dressed for dinner. She had decided, after rather a lot of conversation about it, that the belief that our better people do not dress for dinner on the first night out was a superstition. He sauntered up to the smoking-room for his first cocktail aboard, feeling very glossy and handsome and much-traveled. Then he was feeling very lonely, for the smoking-room was filled with amiable-looking people who apparently all knew one another. And he knew nobody aboard save Fran.

“That’s the one trouble. I’m going to miss Tub and Doc Hazzard and the rest horribly,” he brooded. “I wish they were along! Then it would be about perfect.”

He was occupying an alcove with a semi-circular leather settee, before a massy table. The room was crowded, and a square-rigged Englishman, blown into the room with a damp whiff of sea air, stopped at Sam’s table asking abruptly, “Mind if I sit here?”

The Englishman ordered his cocktail with competence:

“Now be very careful about this, steward. I want half Booth gin and half French vermouth, and just four drops of orange bitters, and no Italian vermouth, remember, no Italian vermouth.” As the Englishman gulped his drink, Sam enjoyed hating him. The man was perfectly expressionless, like a square-headed wooden idol, colored like an idol of cedar wood. “Supercilious as the devil. Never would be friendly, not till he’d known you ten years. Well, he needn’t worry! I’m not going to speak to him! Curious how an Englishman like that can make you feel that you’re small and skinny and your tie’s badly tied without even looking at you! Well, he——”

The Englishman spoke, curtly:

“Decent weather, for a February crossing.”

“Is it? I don’t really know. Never crossed before.”

“Really?”

“You’ve crossed often?”

“Oh, perhaps twenty times. I was with the British War Mission during the late argument. They were always chasing me across. Lockert’s my name. I’m growing cocoa down in British Guiana now. Hot there! Going to stay in London?”

“I think so, for a while. I’m on an indefinite vacation.”

Sam had the American yearning to become acquainted, to tell all about his achievements, not as boasting but to establish himself as a worthy fellow.

“I’ve been manufacturing motor cars—the Revelation—thought it was about time to quit and find out what the world was like. Dodsworth is my name.”

“Pleased to meet you.” (Like most Europeans, Lockert believed that all Americans of all classes always said “Pleased to meet you,” and expected so to be greeted in turn.) “Revelation? Jolly good car. Had one in Kent. My cousin—live with him when I’m home—bouncing old retired general—he’s dotty over motors. Roars around on a shocking old motor bike—mustache and dignity flying in the morning breeze—atrocious bills for all the geese and curates he runs over. He’s insanely pro-American—am myself, except for your appalling ice water. Have another cocktail?”

In twenty minutes, Sam and Major Clyde Lockert had agreed that the “labor turnover” was too high, that driving by night into the brilliance of headlights was undesirable, that Bobby Jones was a player of golf, and that they themselves were men of the world and cheery companions.

“I’ll meet lots of people. And I like this ship. This is the greatest day of my life—next to my marriage, of course,” Sam gloated, as the second dinner gong flooded the ship with waves of hysterical sound and he marched out to rouse Fran from her mysterious activities.

There was awaiting him in his cabin a wireless from Tub Pearson:

BON VOYAGE STOP LONDON SURE SEE MY NEPHEW

JACK STARLING AMERICAN EMBASSY LIVING GEORGIAN

HOUSE STOP DONT RAISE ON BOBTAILED STRAIGHTS

WISH WITH YOU TUB.

He wondered about introducing Major Lockert to Fran.

He was never able to guess how she would receive the people whom he found in the alley and proudly dragged in to her. Business men whom he regarded as upstanding and vigorous, she often pronounced dull; European visitors whom he found elegant, she was likely to call “not quite the real thing”; and men whom he had doubtfully presented to her as worthy but rather mutton-headed, she had been known to consider fine and very sensitive. And for all her theoretical desire to make their house a refuge for him and for whomever he liked to invite, she had never learned to keep her opinions of people to herself. When she was bored by callers, she would beg “Do you mind if I run up to bed now—such a headache,” with a bright friendliness which fooled no one save herself, and which left their guests chilled and awkward.

Would she find Lockert heavy?

While they sat in the music room over after-dinner coffee, with a dance beginning in the cleared space, Lockert came ambling up to them.

“Mr. Lockert—my wife,” Sam mumbled.

Lockert’s stolidity did not change as he bowed, as he sat down in answer to a faint invitation, but Sam noted that his pale blue eyes came quickly alive and searched Fran with approval.... Fran’s lovely pallor, in a robe de style such as only her slenderness could bear.

Sam settled back with his cigar and let them talk. To him, always, the best talk was no brilliance of his own, but conversation that amused Fran and drew her out of her silken sulkiness.

“You’ve been long in America, Mr. Lockert?”

“Not this time. I’ve been living in British Guiana—plantation—no soda for your whisky, and always the chance of finding a snake curled up in your chair on the verandah—nice big snakes, all striped, very handsome and friendly—don’t seem to get used to ’em.”

Lockert spoke to her not with such impersonal friendliness as he had for Sam, not with the bored dutifulness which most men in Zenith showed toward any woman over a flapperish eighteen, but a concentration, an eagerness in the presence of attractive women, an authentic need for women, which seemed to flatter Fran and to rouse her, yet make her timid. She had first looked at Lockert with metallic courtesy. “Here was another of those ponderous business men that Sam was always dragging around.” Now she concentrated on him, she forgot Sam, and murmured youthfully:

“It sounds dreadful. And yet so exciting! I think I should be glad of a nice striped snake, for a change! I’m terribly fed up with the sound, safe American cities where you never find anything in your chair more thrilling than the morning paper. I think I’ll go look for snakes!”

“Are you going East?”

“Don’t know. Isn’t it nice! No plans beyond London.”

“You’ll stay in London a bit?”

“Yes, if there aren’t too many Americans there. Why is it that the travelling American is such a dreadful person? Look at those ghastly people at that second table there—no, just beyond the pillar—father with horn-rimmed spectacles, certain to be talking about either Coolidge or Prohibition—earnest mother in home-made frock out to hunt down Culture and terribly grim about it—daughter with a voice like a file. Why is it?”

“And why is it that you Americans, the nice ones, are so much more snobbish than the English?”

She gasped, and Sam awaited a thunderbolt, which did not come. Lockert was calm and agreeable, and she astonishingly bent to his domination with a puzzled: “Are we, really?”

“Appallingly! I know only two classes of people who hate their own race—or tribe or nation or whatever you care to call it—who travel principally to get away from their own people, who never speak of them except with loathing, who are pleased not to be taken as belonging to them. That is, the Americans and the Jews!”

“Oh, come now, that’s idiotic! I’m as proud of being——No! That’s so. Partly. You’re right. Why is it?”

“I suppose it’s because your boosters go so much to the other extreme, talking about ‘God’s Country’——”

“But that expression is never used any more.”

“It isn’t? Anyway: ‘greatest country on earth’ and ‘we won the war.’ And your ghastly city-boosting tours and Elks’ conventions—people like you hate this bellowing. And then I do think the English have, as you would say, ‘put something over on you’——”

“I’ve never used the phrase!”

“——by sitting back and quietly assuming that we’re the noblest and rightest people on earth. And if any man or any nation has the courage or the magnificent egotism to do that long enough, almost every one will accept it from him. Oh, the English are essentially more insufferable than the Americans——”

“But not so noisy about it,” mused Fran.

Sam was not at all sure that he liked this discussion.