He glanced once more at the showy lady across the aisle. She had
finished her chicken wing, and was dipping her fingers in a finger-bowl,
thus displaying to sparkling advantage a number of handsome rings.

"My boy's girl's mother a painted actress," he muttered as he looked.
"Not if I know it." And then he muttered: "_You'd_ look like an actress
if you was painted."

Though the words can not have been distinguished, the sounds were
audible.

"Sir?" said the lady, stiffly but courteously.

"Nothing, Ma'am," muttered Mark Anthony, much abashed. "I'm surprised to
see so much water in this arid corner of the world, where I have often
suffered for want of it. I must have been talking to myself to that
effect. I hope you will excuse me."

The lady looked out of the window--not hers, but Saterlee's.

"It does look," she said, "as if the waters had divorced themselves from
the bed of ocean."

She delivered this in a quick but telling voice. Saterlee was shocked at
the comparison.

"I suppose," she continued, "we may attribute those constant and tedious
delays to which we have been subjected all day to the premature melting
of snow in the fastnesses of the Sierras?"