"The Jersey’s trip is a little longer," she said, "but the difference is slight. The Lackawanna appeals to me more. Lackawanna! Don’t you love the music in that name? Besides, Araminta, the Jersey boats are painted a sickly gray, while the Lackawanna boats are maroon. A wonderful maroon! And they have a glorious seat on the upper deck, directly facing the bow." "Very well, let’s take the Lackawanna," said Janet, to whom it was all one. They were soon ensconced in the very seat on the top deck which Cornelia coveted. But if Janet had any hopes of hearing a great deal more about Claude Fontaine, she was soon disillusioned. She did not yet understand her friend, to whom the world was an audience at a stage play in which Cornelia Covert had the star part. She speedily learned that Cornelia had not gone to all this trouble to analyze the love affairs of other people. No. The moment had been chosen and the stage had been set to make Janet the recipient of the sacred narrative of Cornelia’s experience with Percival Houghton. The tale did not begin until the boat was well under way, so that Janet had an opportunity to revel in the swell of the mighty Hudson and to contrast the differing aspects of the two banks. The Palisaded Jersey side was almost hidden by huge ocean steamers, except at the spot where the Castle Point Terrace of Stevens Institute rose serenely above a forest of quivering masts. Janet thought the heights of Hoboken quite dwarfed by the towering office structures of lower Manhattan. Cornelia interrupted her ineffable story long enough to repeat another opinion of Robert’s without acknowledgment. It was to the effect that the commercial skyscrapers on the Hudson were as grimly symbolic of ownership as the castles that overlooked the Rhine. Did Janet realize that the lords of these skyscraping fortresses were the masters of the river and thus of the country on which the river’s port had a strangle hold? In each of the big business edifices, thousands of mercantile retainers served their liege lords with pen or typewriter as industriously as ever men-at-arms flourished crossbow or arquebus in the brave days of old. Only, the economic factor in the comparison was all in favor of the industrial barons of today. Their armies, opulence and power were of a magnitude that would have caused the robber barons of the Rhine to expire with envy. *III*