They put themselves on us by main force."
"Oh yes, I can testify to that. Therefore I'm glad too. We should have
missed it, I think."
"How seriously you take it!" Mrs. Nettlepoint amusedly cried.
"Ah wait a few days!"--and I got up to leave her.
CHAPTER III
The _Patagonia_ was slow, but spacious and comfortable, and there was a
motherly decency in her long nursing rock and her rustling old-fashioned
gait, the multitudinous swish, in her wake, as of a thousand proper
petticoats. It was as if she wished not to present herself in port with
the splashed eagerness of a young creature. We weren't numerous enough
quite to elbow each other and yet weren't too few to support--with that
familiarity and relief which figures and objects acquire on the great
bare field of the ocean and under the great bright glass of the sky. I
had never liked the sea so much before, indeed I had never liked it at
all; but now I had a revelation of how in a midsummer mood it could
please. It was darkly and magnificently blue and imperturbably
quiet--save for the great regular swell of its heartbeats, the pulse of
its life; and there grew to be something so agreeable in the sense of
floating there in infinite isolation and leisure that it was a positive
godsend the _Patagonia_ was no racer.
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