At such a first meal as this, so to speak, when, barring one, we had all come together for the first time, there was no want of British reserve and shyness. We chiefly contented ourselves with staring. Colonel Bannister alone talked freely; he was loud on the subject of army grievances, and was rendered indeed, intolerably fluent and noisy by the respectful attention he received from a gentleman who sat over against him, one Mr. Hodder, a tall, thin, nervous, yellow-faced man, with a paralytic catching up of his breath in his speech, who was going to India to fill some post of responsibility in a college. Mrs. Bannister with her hawks-bill nose, grey hair, and full figure, sat bolt upright, eating with avidity, and sweeping the faces round about her with a small severe eye. I watched little Mrs. Radcliffe with attention. It was not hard to guess that she was an amiable, fidgety, anxious body, of elastic properties of mind, easily, but only temporarily, to be repressed. She talked in a quick way to her niece, darting what she had to say into the girl’s ear, with an abrupt withdrawal of her head, and an earnest look at Miss Temple’s face. The other would sometimes faintly smile, but for the most part her air was one of haughty abstraction. Indeed, it was easy to see that, so far as her opinion of her fellow-passengers went, it was not quite flattering to the bulk of us. It was a noble morning, indeed, on deck. There was a long blue heave of swell from the northward, quiet as the rise and fall of a sleeper’s breast, and the white buttons of the ship’s trucks, glancing like silver against the moist blue of the sky, swung so slowly and tenderly to and fro that one could almost watch them without perception of any movement. The ocean was of a deep sea blue, all to eastward flashing under the sun, and the small waves chased us with a voice of summer in the caressing seething of the snow of their heads against the sides of the Indiaman. The ship had studdingsails set, and under these far overhanging wings the water trembled back the radiance that fell from the swelling cloths, as though there were a floating thinness of quicksilver there prismatic as a soap-bubble.