as I dropped this last letter into the sea, I thought that hereafter the sea, like the grove, would always seem sacred to me, would seem almost to belong to me—even as he did belong to me!
On board the Roussillon, and subsequently when I reached Paris and Dijon, I tried ardently to plunge into gaiety. I summoned all the light-heartedness I could muster. After all, I had come to lose myself, to try to find a temporary new existence, even to briefly forgetting, if possible, the problem of how to obtain my daughter for myself.
I had gay clothes and plenty of them, and I put wine in my water as everyone else did, and tried to act the part I suppose I actually did look—a modern flapper. Certainly with the short skirts everybody wore then, and with bobbed hair, I could not have looked as old as I was—twenty-six.
But all the superficial gaiety in which I indulged could not make me forget the problem paramount in my mind, and I found myself actually reverting to the study of this man and that man, and wondering whether I would consider him fitted for the role of foster father, in name only. However, the men on board were for the most part very young, and there was but one who looked fairly good to me in this respect. I found out he had a responsible position in a bank, and from his own remarks he evidently had known wealth all his life. He might do, I thought drearily. Then I would shake myself out of this mood and join the young people in their games or talk. But when we landed at Havre, the one man I had quietly been making a study of proceeded to follow his own divergent itinerary, and I forget all about him as a husband possibility.
There were about twenty-five in the Armstrong Party, in which Helen Anderson seemed to be the star traveler. Being with her,
