Page:Travel letters from New Zealand, Australia and Africa (1913).djvu/494

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that shocked me. Another woman passenger is too ill to appear in the dining-room for her meals, but is able to sit in the smoking-room every evening, and puff cigarettes. I'll never become accustomed to women smoking. . . . The young man who paints pictures in oil, and who has a shock of hair which he never combs, is extremely good-natured. Which means that he can't paint much. A genius is always cross and impolite. . . . The emigrants are not allowed to buy beer, so those in the second cabin buy it, and hand it over to the emigrants. I cannot see much difference between the passengers in the second cabin and the emigrants. Many of the second-cabin passengers have friends among the emigrants, and visit them a good deal. Two of the second-cabin passengers are young French girls, accompanied by their mother. We hear they are going to the United States to get rich husbands. The opinion prevails abroad that America is full of rich men who will take nearly anything in the way of a wife. It is a mistake. America has more attractive girls than any other country, and half of them are compelled to get jobs. . . . The Americans in the first cabin live mainly in New York and Boston; we are the only Westerners. . . . One of the passengers in the first cabin is a woman with two children. She has perfect manners, and is no doubt a good woman, but I have somehow got the notion that her husband doesn't appreciate her at her true value. The other women say she is All Soul, but probably her husband thinks that is the trouble with her; I never knew a spiritual woman to please any man except her pastor. I am satisfied that within a few hours after