“You’d better go down and read a few of the last bulletins--or, still better, talk to the wireless operator and learn the more confidential preparations for your reception and entertainment upon your return to England--if you suppose that the British government is so relieved to find that you didn’t burn Reedy and spouse that it’s going to give you a vote of thanks for merely blowing up government property. I told you that you might come on deck, if you took care not to attract too much attention, because no one will be suspecting you while the _Corinthian_ is still at sea. Our friend, the sporty schoolteacher, seems to have come through with an impersonation which had convinced the officers of the _Corinthian_; but she can’t fool the reception committee at New York. Your face and figure, my dear girl, are easily the most familiar in all the U. S. A. this week. You must know how the newspapers hate to give space to a girl like you who’s been such a quiet little body all summer. I’ll bet there haven’t been more than an average of eight different pictures of you in all poses run in each edition this week. Reporters may meet the _Corinthian_ on the high seas, but I feel that probably no one will board the boat before it picks up its pilot; then two tugs from the less enterprising papers and four from the moving-picture concerns will greet our friend, your doubtful double, at quarantine. They’ll know before they’ve taken a thousand feet of film of her that she isn’t you. Then even the English will guess where you are. If the _Corinthian_ could only run out of gasoline, or blow a tire or crack a cylinder, and let us get in first, all right for us; but if the _Corinthian_ goes on in ahead of us, you--dear girl--are elected to be the example to be made to discourage any more of this foreign-legion stuff in the ranks of the British suffragettes. The home secretary seems to feel that you are most eminently qualified to serve as a stopper for more of our sweet girl graduates crossing over and spending their senior vacations at pillage and arson. Rough of them, undoubtedly; but if the _Cumberland_ comes in second, it’s forcibly fed from a funnel for the rest of your natural youth, my dear.” “Why,” Roberta returned resignedly, “do you repeat the if so many times? Isn’t the _Cumberland_ now sure to come in second?” “The _Corinthian’s_ caught up with us now. They’re a little faster than this ship ordinarily, and at present they’re under emphatic orders to make as fast a passage as possible. Even if I should give away our hand by offering to pay our captain for extra coal he’d burn to beat the _Corinthian_ in, this ship couldn’t do it.” “Exactly,” Roberta accepted. “So why pretend that I think I’m escaping? And why say ‘our’ hand? It was entirely your idea that this ship was sure to get in before the _Corinthian_--not mine.”