From the spectacle of sea and sky I turned away at last, only because my senses could take in no more. Then I saw beauty in another form.
A girl was advancing down the deck who embodied the evanescence of the cloud and the grace of the bit of jewel-weed in a way I could never convey to you. You must see me as standing near the stern of the boat, and the long, clean line of the deck, with an irregular fringe of people in deck-chairs, as empty except for this slender, solitary figure. The rise and fall of the ship were a little like those of a bough in the wind, while she was the bird on it. She advanced serenely, sedately, her hands jauntily in the pockets of an ulster, which was gray, with cuffs and collar of sage-green. A sage-green tam-o’-shanter was fastened to a mass of the living fair hair which, for want of a better term, we call golden. Her awareness of herself almost amounted to inference; and as she passed under the row of onlookers’ eyes she seemed to fling out a challenge which was not defiant, but good-natured, defiant but good-natured was the gaze she fixed on me, a gaze as lacking in self-consciousness as it was in hesitation. A child might have looked at you in this way, or a dog, or any other being not afraid of you. Of a blue which could only be compared to that in the rifts in the cloud overhead, her eyes never wavered in their long, calm regard till they were turned on me obliquely as she passed by. She did not, however, look back; and reaching the end of the promenade, she rounded the corner and went up the other way.
Thinking of her merely as a vision seen by chance, I was the more surprised when she entered the dining-saloon, helping my friend Drinkwater. I had purposely got to my place before any one else, so as to avoid the awkwardness of arriving unknown among people who already have made one another’s acquaintance. Moreover, the table being near to one of the main entrances, my corner allowed me to take notes on all who came in. Not that I was interested in my fellow-passengers otherwise than as part of my self-defense. Self-defense, the keeping any one from suspecting the mischance that had befallen me, seemed to me, for the moment, even more important than finding out who I was.