“C. Q.” or, In the Wireless House
I ’ll wait for you! Don’t be long. I am quite afraid to stay here all alone. What if a big sailor should come up?”
“Just shake your finger at him!” replied Micky.
He left her standing gracefully in the wind, the breeze tossing her hair from her white temples and outlining her shapely form under the white coat that floated behind her like the robe of the Wingless Victory. He hurried across the second-cabin deck, where trim, pipe-smoking valets were walking up and down with carefully got up ladies’ maids, and where a husky, swarthy-cheeked chauffeur was playing shuffle-board with a little hunchback boy whose cheerful yet wistful smile made him the pet and comrade of the entire company. He climbed the ladder to the main deck, and stepped gingerly by the ranks of first-cabin passengers—muffled figures “laid out,” as it were, in grotesque rows, their noses buried in books or gazing in sorrowful meditation upon the long rollers that swung past the ship eastward toward Portugal. He dodged in and out between the pedestrians, who, in ill-assorted pairs, blocked the deck and got in one another’s way12
