We rejoiced together singing, and then we fought. There is a directness between experienced intellects which waves aside all formalities. She had seen a lot of life; so had I. She said she thought she would like to walk a little, and we strolled back along the heaving deck to the end of the first cabin section and then to the stern. When we reached there the sky was overcast again, for it was one of those changeable mornings which is now gray, now bright, now misty. Just now the heavens were black and lowering with soft, rain-charged clouds, like the wool of a smudgy sheep. The sea was a rich green in consequence--not a clear green, but a dark, muddy, oil-green. It rose and sank in its endless unrest and one or two boats appeared--a lightship, anchored out all alone against the lowering waste, and a small, black, passenger steamer going somewhere. “I wish my path in life were as white as that and as straight,” observed Miss X., pointing to our white, propeller-churned wake which extended back for half a mile or more. “Yes,” I observed, “you do and you don’t. You do, if it wouldn’t cost you trouble in the future--impose the straight and narrow, as it were.” “Oh, you don’t know,” she exclaimed irritably, that ugly fighting light coming into her eyes, which I had seen there several times before. “You don’t know what my life has been. I haven’t been so bad. We all of us do the best we can. I have done the best I could, considering.” “Yes, yes,” I observed, “you’re ambitious and alive and you’re seeking--Heaven knows what! You would be adorable with your pretty face and body if you were not so--so sophisticated. The trouble with you is--” “Oh, look at that cute little boat out there!” She was talking of the lightship. “I always feel sorry for a poor little thing like that, set aside from the main tide of life and left lonely--with no one to care for it.” “The trouble with you is,” I went on, seizing this new remark as an additional pretext for analysis, “you’re romantic, not sympathetic. You’re interested in that poor little lonely boat because its state is romantic; not pathetic. It may be pathetic, but that isn’t the point with you.” “Well,” she said, “if you had had all the hard knocks I have had, you wouldn’t be sympathetic either. I’ve suffered, I have. My illusions have been killed dead.” “Yes. Love is over with you. You can’t love any more. You can like to be loved, that’s all. If it were the other way about--” I paused to think how really lovely she would be with her narrow lavender eyelids; her delicate, almost retroussé, little nose; her red cupid’s-bow mouth. “Oh,” she exclaimed, with a gesture of almost religious adoration. “I cannot love any one person any more, but I can love love, and I do--all the delicate things it stands for.” “Flowers,” I observed, “jewels, automobiles, hotel bills, fine dresses.” “Oh, you’re brutal. I hate you. You’ve said the cruelest, meanest things that have ever been said to me.”