Dunham turned to go below, from where they stood at the head of the cabin stairs. Staniford looked round, and saw Lydia, whom they had kept from coming up; she must have heard him. He took his cigar from his mouth, and caught up a stool, which he placed near the ship's side, where Lydia usually sat, and without waiting for her concurrence got a stool for himself, and sat down with her. “Well, Miss Blood,” he said, “it's Saturday afternoon at last, and we're at the end of our first week. Has it seemed very long to you?” Lydia's color was bright with consciousness, but the glance she gave Staniford showed him looking tranquilly and honestly at her. “Yes,” she said, “it _has_ seemed long.” “That's merely the strangeness of everything. There's nothing like local familiarity to make the time pass,--except monotony; and one gets both at sea. Next week will go faster than this, and we shall all be at Trieste before we know it. Of course we shall have a storm or two, and that will retard us in fact as well as fancy. But you wouldn't feel that you'd been at sea if you hadn't had a storm.” He knew that his tone was patronizing, but he had theorized the girl so much with a certain slight in his mind that he was not able at once to get the tone which he usually took towards women. This might not, indeed, have pleased some women any better than patronage: it mocked while it caressed all their little pretenses and artificialities; he addressed them as if they must be in the joke of themselves, and did not expect to be taken seriously. At the same time he liked them greatly, and would not on any account have had the silliest of them different from what she was. He did not seek them as Dunham did; their society was not a matter of life or death with him; but he had an elder-brotherly kindness for the whole sex. Lydia waited awhile for him to say something more, but he added nothing, and she observed, with a furtive look: “I presume you've seen some very severe storms at sea.” “No,” Staniford answered, “I haven't. I've been over several times, but I've never seen anything alarming. I've experienced the ordinary seasickening tempestuousness.” “Have you--have you ever been in Italy?” asked Lydia, after another pause. “Yes,” he said, “twice; I'm very fond of Italy.” He spoke of it in a familiar tone that might well have been discouraging to one of her total unacquaintance with it. Presently he added of his own motion, looking at her with his interest in her as a curious study, “You're going to Venice, I think Mr. Dunham told me.” “Yes,” said Lydia. “Well, I think it's rather a pity that you shouldn't arrive there directly, without the interposition of Trieste.” He scanned her yet more closely, but with a sort of absence in his look, as if he addressed some ideal of her. “Why?” asked Lydia, apparently pushed to some self-assertion by this way of being looked and talked at.