"Everything in the world that goes up must come down," he was saying didactically, "except prices. They alone defy the laws of gravity." Peter challenged the aphorism, wordily. Mrs. Marne smiled at Mary across the flower-sweet table. "No," answered Hare presently. "Money isn't everything, but it is most. It makes the mare go; also the nightmare. It talks, it shouts, and in the only language that needs no interpreter. I may describe it, without fear of contradiction, as the Esperanto of commerce." "Clever, Pinky!" called his sister, derisively. "Confess that you rehearsed this before a mirror." The luncheon ended. If anything had been wanting to prove how agreeable it had been, it appeared now in the pretty reluctance with which the ladies rose. There was the customary pushing back of chairs, smoothing down of garments, recovering of handkerchiefs from beneath the board. The room and the table were the objects of new compliments, given in farewell. "Who would have dreamed," said Mary, looking back from the door at her father's perfectly appointed room, "that yachts were as nice as this?" "And to think," said Mrs. Marne, "that it was all done by a Mere Man." McTosh, the mere man in question, blushed violently behind his deft hand. They stepped up on deck into the shade of a great striped awning, and loitered along the side, caught by the beauty of the late summer scene. Sky and water and green wood blended into practised perfectness. The rippling water was blue as the heavens, which was very blue indeed. The sun kissed it like a lover. "Will some one kindly tell me," demanded Hare, referring to his sister's remark, "how the superstition arose that men have no taste?" "I have read," said Mary idly, her back against the rail, "that it was invented by the authority who started the slander about women's having no sense of humor." "Why, they haven't, have they?" "You're wrong there, Hare," said Peter, out of his fathomless ignorance. "For my part I think that women are often more amusing than men." "Of course, Maginnis, of course. The point is that it never dawns on them." They were strung out along the after deck, a gay and friendly company, exactly as Varney had pictured them in his thoughts. From the hatch emerged the stewards, in stately processional, bearing coffee and cigars, their paraphernalia and appurtenances. Twenty feet away, on the other side, was to be seen the sailing-master's wife, sitting under orders, sedate, matronly, knitting a pale blue shawl and giving to the bright scene an air of indescribable domesticity. "Women," said Mrs. Marne to Varney, "have a splendid sense of humor. I am a woman and I know. True, we keep a tight grip on our wit when we are with men, because, whatever men may say in moments like these, they do loathe and despise a comical woman. But when we are alone together--ah, dearie me, what funny things we do say! Don't we, Mary?"