worth knowing, she was wholly unprepared to be blamed for the drowning of a troubled suitor. For she knew well enough that it was on her account that he had come out into the open sea in the Peanut.
In justice, it must be said that if Nelson had been less arrogant when the Caliph offered him help, she might have spared more thought than she did for the pathos of his struggles in the water and for the probable grief of his family. But pathos does not attach itself to the memory of an overbearing person; and so her shocked imagination was fully occupied with miserable prophetic pictures of her own shattered summer. The season's career, so triumphantly begun last night, was already a ruin; she would be coldly looked upon; she would be pointed out with harsh disapproval; and, what was sheerly unendurable, for the next week or two—her mother's sense of good taste might insist upon longer—she could not even go to any of the dances. It was conceivable that the young people of this new place, at the outset so cordial, might "drop" her; and, shuddering, she faced a pariah's tragedy.
"Platter!" she moaned. "I can't go back! Turn the boat around. I can't go back!"
"Got to," he said. "We got to go through it."
