“Jimmy! I say, Jimmy!”

The window went up again.

“Well?”

“I prefer blondes myself.”

“Go to bed!”

“Very well. Good night.”

“Good night.”

Jimmy withdrew his head, and sat down on the chair Mifflin had vacated. A moment later he rose and switched off the light. It was pleasanter to sit and think in the dark. His thoughts wandered off in many channels, but always came back to the girl on the Mauretania. It was absurd, of course. He didn’t wonder that Arthur Mifflin had treated the thing as a joke. Good old Arthur! Glad he had made a success. But was it a joke? Who was it said that the point of a joke was like the point of a needle—so small that it is apt to disappear entirely when directed straight at oneself? If anybody else had told him such a limping romance he would have laughed himself. Only when you are the centre of a romance, however limping, you see it from a different angle. Of course, told baldly, it was absurd. He could see that. But something right at the back of his mind told him that it was not altogether absurd. And yet—— Love didn’t come like that—in a flash. You might just as well expect a house to spring into being in a moment. Or a ship. Or an automobile. Or a table. Or a—— He sat up with a jerk. In another instant he would have been asleep.

He thought of bed, but bed seemed a long way off—the deuce of a way. Acres of carpet to be crawled over, and then the dickens of a climb at the end of it. Besides undressing. Nuisance—undressing. That was a nice dress that girl had worn on the fourth day out. Tailor-made. He liked tailor-mades. He liked all her dresses. He liked her. Had she liked him? So hard to tell if you don’t get a chance of speaking. She was dark. Arthur liked blondes. Arthur was a fool! Good old Arthur! Glad he had made a success! Now he could marry if he liked. If he wasn’t so restless. If he didn’t feel that he couldn’t stop more than a day in any place. But would the girl have him? If they had never spoken it made it so hard to——

At 

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