Did any one ever! She tossed a faint defiance: "I can't. No. I won't--can't--ever again, against my own kin." "There are things stronger than kin." "I'd like to know what!" "Truth. Justice. Honor. Right. Public welfare." She waved them all away as wholly immaterial. "Hoh!" With a kindness far too much like magnanimity to suit her, Hugh, drawing backward, smiled, and replied, not as pressing the argument but as dropping it: "One can be against one's kin, yet not against them. Basile knows that. He proved it to-day." "Basile--oh, Mr. Hugh, Basile wants to see you. Mom-a's sent me as much for you as for the twins. Basile's asked for you. But of course if your father----" "I'll come, the moment I can be spared. Is your brother really better?" Ramsey flinched as from pain. She leaned on the shoulder of the nurse--who had come close--and sadly shook her head. But then she straightened smilingly and said: "If you're coming at all----" She might have finished but for a faint sound that reached her from directly underfoot, a sound of sawing. She faced sharply about, passed into the cabin, and found the Gilmores and the amateurs in the midst of their play. XLIII WHICH FROM WHICH This world of tragic contrasts and cross-purposes, realities and fictions, this world where the many so largely find their inspiration in the performances of the few, was startlingly typified to Ramsey as, out of the upper night and the darkness of her troubles, she came in upon the show; the audience sitting in their self-imposed twilight of a few dimmed lamps, designedly forgetful of the voyage for which all were there, and the players playing their parts as though the play were the only thing real. If the prefigurement was at any point vague it was none the less arresting. As the _Votaress_--or Gideon Hayle's _Wild Girl_--might, in full career, strike on hidden sands, so Ramsey struck on the thought--or call it the unformulated perception--that whoever would really live must, by clear choice and force of will, keep himself--herself--adjusted to this world as a whole; as one great multitudinous entity with a stronger, higher claim on each mere part's sympathy, service, sacrifice, than any mere part can ever hold on it. In a word, Hugh Courteney, baby elephant, born tyrant, egotist--or egoist, whichever it was--self-confessed egotist, stone-faced egoist--with his big-wig airs and big-fiddle voice--was nearer right than she would _ever_ submit to confess to him: there _were_ things stronger than kin, bigger every way; and other things bigger than those bigger things, and yet others still bigger than those, and so on and on to the world's circumference. Staggering discovery. Yet how infinitely old it looked the moment she clearly saw it: old, obvious, beautiful, and ugly as the man in the moon. It chanced that right there and then she was forced to accept its practical application. A white-jacket said to her in a muffled voice: