entirely, hopelessly, seasick person I’ve seen yet. She--well, never mind. She’ll get well again, and in the meanwhile I must tell you about the lady. She spoke to me kindly and said: “‘As you and I seem to be the only well passengers on board, I think I’m entitled to a sea acquaintance with you, Miss Dorothy. You know sea acquaintances carry no obligations with them beyond the voyage, and so no matter how chummy we may become out here on the ocean you needn’t even bow to me if we meet again on shore.’ She seemed so altogether nice that I told her I wouldn’t have a mere sea acquaintance with her, but would get acquainted with her ‘for truly,’ as the children say. She seemed glad when I said that, and we talked for two hours or more, after which we went to luncheon and sat side by side--as everybody else is seasick we had the table all to ourselves and didn’t need to mind whose chairs we sat in. “Well, she is a strangely fascinating person, and the more I know of her the more she fascinates me. Sometimes she seems as young as I myself am; sometimes she seems very old. She is tall and what I call willowy. That is to say she bends as easily in any direction as a willow wand could, and with as much of grace. Indeed grace is her dominant characteristic, as I discovered when she danced a Spanish fandango to my playing--just all to ourselves you know, behind the deck house. She knows everybody worth knowing, too--all the editors and artists and actors and singers and pianists and people in society that I have met, and a great many others that I haven’t met at all. And she really does know them, too, for one day in her cabin I saw a great album of hers, and when she saw I was interested in it she bade me take it on deck, saying that perhaps it might amuse me during the hour she must give to sleep. And when I read it, I found it full of charming things in prose and verse, all addressed to her, and all signed by great people, or nearly all. She told me afterwards that she valued the other things most--the things signed by people whose names meant nothing to me. ‘For those,’ she said, ‘are my real friends. The rest--well, no matter. They are professionals, and they do such things well.’ I don’t just know what she meant by that, but I have a suspicion that she loves truth better than anything else, and that she doesn’t think distinguished people always tell the truth when they write in albums. At any rate when I asked her if I might write and sign a little sentiment in her album, she said, with more of emotion than the occasion seemed to call for: ‘Not in that book, my child! Not as a tag to all those people. If you will write me three or four lines of your own on a simple sheet of paper and sign it, I’ll have it sumptuously bound when I get to Paris, in a book all to itself, and nobody else shall ever write a line to go with it while I live.’