dancers' merriment enhanced by stumbling lurches born of the vessel's
slow, long rollings on the sea's vast, smooth-surfaced swells.

The old man and his daughter never joined in these crude pleasurings
and John found in this a certain comfort which he did not try to
analyze. His mother, also watching now and then, observed it, too, and
felt her interest in them increasing. Two days before the slow old
ship was due to reach New York she had almost made her mind up to
investigate the pair. Should she find that they were worthy, she told
John (that is, should she find they could, in any way, be useful in
her campaign of next summer, which, already, she was planning) she
might try to help them in New York. Her resentment of John's interest
in them had faded. If they were ordinary emigrants he would not see
them after the ship docked, if they were of enough importance to be
useful to her, if they had influential friends abroad, the more he saw
of them the better. Mrs. Vanderlyn was not a mercenary woman. The only
gold she worshiped had been beaten into coronets; of that which had
been minted she had plenty. She did not envy fortunes, though her envy
of position was unbounded.

"You might make a little inquiry," she told her son. "If they should
really have friends among the aristocracy--"

It both amused and angered him. He had imbibed, at a small western
college and in the little taste of business life which he had had in
New York City, a wondrous spirit of democracy which his stay in Europe
had by no means lessened. It was not the man's potential social
usefulness which made appeal to him, it was the soul which he saw
shining, clear and lovely, in his daughter's eyes; it was not the
father's slow, grey dignity which made him wish to help him, it was