It’s being an artist, Mrs. Maurier said to herself with helpless despondence. Mrs. Wiseman, Miss Jameson, Mark and Mr. Talliaferro sat at bridge. She herself did not feel like playing: the strain of her party kept her too nervous and wrought up. “You simply cannot tell what they’re going to do,” she said aloud in her exasperation, seeing again Major Ayers’ vanishing awkward shape and Fairchild leaning over the rail and howling after him like a bullvoiced Druid priest at a sacrifice.

“Yes,” Mrs. Wiseman agreed, “it’s like an excursion, isn’t it?—all drunkenness and trampling around,” she added, attempting to finesse. “Damn you, Mark.”

“It’s worse than that,” the niece corrected, pausing to watch the hissing fall of cards, “it’s like a cattle boat—all trampling around.”

Mrs. Maurier sighed. “Whatever it is . . .” her sentence died stillborn. The niece drifted away and a tall shape appeared from shadow and joined her, and they went on down the dark deck and from her sight. It was that queer shabby Mr. Gordon, and she knew a sudden sharp stab of conscience, of having failed in her duty as a hostess. She had barely exchanged a word with him since they came aboard. It’s that terrible Mr. Fairchild, she told herself. But who could have known that a middleaged man, and a successful novelist, could or would conduct himself so?

The moon was getting up, spreading a silver flare of moonlight on the water. The Nausikaa swung gently at her cables, motionless but never still, sleeping but not dead, as is the manner of ships on the seas of the world; cradled like a silver dreaming gull on the water . . . her yacht. Her party, people whom she had invited together for their mutual pleasure. . . . Maybe they think I ought to get drunk with them, she thought.

She roused herself, creating conversation. The cardplayers shuffled and dealt interminably, replying Mmmm to her remarks, irrelevant and detached, or pausing to answer sensibly with a patient deference. Mrs. Maurier rose briskly.

“Come, people, I know you are tired of cards. Let’s have some music and dance a while.”

“I’d rather play bridge with Mark than dance with him,” Mrs. Wiseman said. . . . “Whose trick was that?”

“There’ll be plenty of men when the music starts,” Mrs. Maurier said.

“Mmmm,” replied Mrs. Wiseman. . . . “It’ll take more than a victrola record to get any men on this party. . . . You’ll need extradition papers. . . . Three without and three aces. How much is that, Ernest?”

“Wouldn’t you like to dance, Mr. Talliaferro?” Mrs. Maurier persisted.

“Whatever you wish, dear lady,” Mr. Talliaferro answered with courteous detachment, busy with his pencil. “That makes—” he totted a column of his neat figures, then he raised his head. “I beg your pardon: did you say something?”

“Don’t bother,” Mrs. Maurier said. “I’ll put on a record myself: I’m sure our party will gather when they hear it.” She wound up the portable victrola and put on a record. “You finish your rubber, and I’ll look about and see whom I can find,” she added. Mmmm, they replied.

The victrola raised its teasing rhythms of saxophones and drums, and Mrs. Maurier prowled around, peering into the shadows. She found the steward first, whom she dispatched to the gentlemen with a command couched in the form of an invitation. Then further along she discovered Gordon, and her niece sitting on the rail with her legs locked about a stanchion.

“Do be careful,” she said, “you might fall. We are going to dance a while,” she added happily.

“Not me,” her niece answered quickly. “Not to-night, anyway. You have to dance enough in this world on dry land.”

“You will certainly not prevent Mr. Gordon dancing, however. Come, Mr. Gordon, we need you.”

“I don’t dance,” Gordon answered shortly.

“You don’t dance?” Mrs. Maurier repeated. “You really don’t dance at all?”

“Run along, Aunt Pat,” the niece answered for him “We’re talking about art.”

Mrs. Maurier sighed. “Where’s Theodore?” she asked at last. “Perhaps he will help us out.”

“He’s in bed. He went to bed right after dinner. But you might go down and ask him if he wants to get up and dance.”

Mrs. Maurier stared helplessly at Gordon. Then she turned away. The steward met her: the gentlemen were sorry, but they had all gone to bed. They were tired after such a strenuous day. She sighed again and passed on to the companionway. There seemed to be nothing else she could do for them. I’ve certainly tried, she told herself, taking this thin satisfaction, and stopped again while something shapeless in the dark companionway unblent, becoming two; and after a white Pete said from the darkness:

“It’s me and Jenny.”

Jenny made a soft meaningless sound, and Mrs. Maurier bent forward suspiciously. Mrs. Wiseman’s remark about excursion boats recurred to her.

“You are enjoying the moon, I suppose?” she remarked.

“Yessum,” Jenny answered. “We’re just sitting here.”

“Don’t you children want to dance? They have started the victrola,” Mrs. Maurier said in a resurgence of optimism.

“Yessum,” said Jenny again, after a while. But they made no further move, and Mrs. Maurier sniffed. Quite genteelly, and she said icily:

“Excuse me, please.”

They made room for her to pass and she descended without looking back again, and found her door. She snapped the light switch viciously. Then she sighed again.

It’s being an artist, she told herself again, helplessly.

.          .          .          .          .          .          .

“Damn, damn, damn,” said Mrs. Wiseman slapping her cards on the table. The victrola record had played itself through and into an endless monotonous rasping. “Mark, stop that thing, as you love God. I’m far enough behind, without being jinxed.” The ghostly poet rose obediently and Mrs. Wiseman swept her hand amid the cards on the table, scattering them. “I’m not going to spend any more of my life putting little spotted squares of paper in orderly sequence for three dull people, not to-night, anyway. Gimme a cigarette, some one.” She thrust her chair back and Mr. Talliaferro opened his case to her. She took one and lifted her foot to the other knee and scratched a match on the sole of her slipper. “Let’s talk a while instead.”

“Where on earth did you get those garters?” Miss Jameson asked curiously.

“These?” she flipped her skirt down. “Why? Don’t you like ’em?”

“They are a trifle out of the picture, on you.”

“What kind would you suggest for me? Pieces of colored string?”

“You ought to have black ones clasped with natural size red roses,” Mark Frost told her. “That’s what one would expect to find on you.”

“Wrrrong, me good man,” Mrs. Wiseman answered dramatically. “You have wronged me foully. . . . Where’s Mrs. Maurier, I wonder?”

“She must have caught somebody. That Gordon man, perhaps,” Miss Jameson replied. “I saw him at the rail yonder a while ago.”

“Ah, Mr. Talliaferro!” exclaimed Mrs. Wiseman. “Look out for yourself. Widders and artists, you know. You see how susceptible I am, myself. Wasn’t there ever a fortune teller to warn you of a tall red stranger in your destiny?”

“You are a widow only by courtesy,” the poet rejoined, “like the serving maids in sixteenth century literature.”

“So are some of the artists, my boy,” Mrs. Wiseman replied. “But all the men on board are not even artists. What, Ernest?”

Mr. Talliaferro bridled smugly through the smoke of his cigarette. Mrs. Wiseman consumed hers in an unbroken series of deep draughts and flipped it railward: a twinkling scarlet coal. “I said talk,” she reminded them, “not a few mild disjointed beans of gossip.” She rose. “Come on, let’s go to bed, Dorothy.”

Miss Jameson sat, a humorless inertia. “And leave that moon?”

Mrs. Wiseman yawned, stretching her arms. The moon spread her silver ceaseless hand on the dark water. Mrs. Wiseman turned, spreading her arms in a flamboyant gesture, in silhouette against it. “Ah, Moon, poor weary one. . . . By yon black moon,” she apostrophized.

“No wonder it looks tired,” the poet remarked hollowly. “Think of how much adultery it’s had to look upon.”

“Or assume the blame for,” Mrs. Wiseman amended. She dropped her arms. “I wish I were in love,” she said. “Why aren’t you and Ernest more . . . more . . . Come on, Dorothy, let’s go to bed.”

“Have I got to move?” Miss Jameson said. She rose, however. The men rose also, and the two women departed. When they had gone Mr. Talliaferro gathered up the cards Mrs. Wiseman had scattered. Some of them had fallen to the deck.