Milicent went to bed and turned out the light. The boat did not move; and after indefinite hours of lying still in the dark, Ruth dropped to sleep. When she awoke it was daylight; the ship was swaying, falling, rising; the tremor of engines shook it. They were at sea. The waves were higher than any Ruth had encountered before, but they were slower and smoother too--not nearly so jumpy and choppy as the Lake Michigan surf in a strong wind. The big steamer rose and rolled to them far more steadily than the vessels upon which Ruth had voyaged on holidays on the lake. Milicent Wetherell, in the lower berth, lay miserably awake with no desire whatever to get up; but Ruth let the stewardess lead her to the bath; she dressed and found the way to the dining-saloon. She was supplied, along with a number designating her “abandon ship” place in starboard lifeboat No. 7, a numeral for a seat at a table. At this hour of half after nine, there were perhaps fifty men at breakfast and just five other women or girls; four men were seated at the table to which Ruth was led--Captain Forraker one of them. He arose as she approached. Possibly he remembered her, Ruth thought, from an introduction at Mrs. Corliss’; much more probably Hubert Lennon--who undoubtedly had had her placed at this table--had reminded Captain Forraker about her. His three table-companions arose and Captain Forraker presented them to her; they were all English--two young officers and one older man, in rank a colonel, who had been about some ordnance inspection work in America. Ruth sat down; they sat down and resumed their talk; and Ruth got the first of her morning amazements. She was in a foreign land, already; she was not just on the way there, though still in sight of Long Island. She was now in Europe, with Europeans thinking and talking, not as guests of America, but as Europeans at home again. Ruth had been brought up, as a good American, to believe her country the greatest in the world; and, implicitly, she believed it. She recognized that sons and daughters of other nations likewise were reared to believe their native land the best and their people the noblest; but she never had been able to quite believe that they really could think so. They must make an exception, down deep in their consciousness, for America, she was sure; however loyal they might be to their own institutions and to their own fellows, they must admire more highly the American ideals of freedom and democracy, and they must consider that the people who lived by and for those ideals were potentially, at least, the greatest.