Lady Betty Across the Water

								

horror!--I'm certain I caught her repeating the formula she'd used at
luncheon. "I am Mrs. Stuyvesant-Knox, and I have as my guest, etc,
etc." To be sure, she had walked off to a little distance with the
deck-steward, where our chairs were, and I might have been mistaken;
but two or three people who were standing near looked suddenly very
hard at me, and I know I turned scarlet with annoyance, to be labelled
in that way, as if I were a parcel marked "glass" and to be handled
with care.
Afterwards, when I came to read the passenger-list, I found that there
was nobody else on board with any sort of title, not even an Honourable
Anybody; otherwise, of course, Mrs. Ess Kay's little manoeuvre (which
I'm afraid must have been meant for snobbishness) wouldn't have excited
the slightest notice.
"Now," said Mrs. Ess Kay, when we were settled in our places, "I know a
good many people on the ship, but most of them are Nobodies, and I do
not intend to be troubled with them, nor do I think that the Duchess
would care to have me let Betty mix herself up with anybody and
everybody. I shall do a great deal of weeding and select her
acquaintances carefully."
"Betty," indeed! I'd never told her that she might call me Betty; and I
hate having persons I don't care for take hold of my name, without
using a handle to touch it. It makes me feel as I did when I was a
child, and Mother commanded me to let myself be kissed by unkissable
and extraneous grown-ups.
Thank goodness, Vic and I have come into the world with something of
poor Father's sense of humour. My share often serves me as well as balm
on a wound, or as a nice, dry, crackly little biscuit which you're
enchanted to find when you're hungry, and thought you had nothing to
eat; and I got a good deal of quiet comfort out of it during Mrs. Ess
Kay's "weeding" process, which otherwise would have done nothing but
make me squirm.
When we had been on deck for a short time, a number of people came up
to speak to Mrs. Ess Kay, and some to Miss Woodburn. The water was as
smooth as the floor of a ballroom when it's been well waxed for a
dance, and there was no excuse for the most sensitive person to be ill;
consequently the deck was something like a kaleidoscope, with all its
moving groups of men and women, girls and children. Most of the
best-looking and best-dressed ones were Americans, and a great many
seemed to know each other. Some of them laughed a good deal, and talked
in high voices, putting emphasis on prepositions, which Miss Mackinstry
and the others would never let me do in writing compositions. Somehow,
though, when these people spoke it sounded very nice and cordial, more
so than it does when English people greet each other, though the voices
weren't so sweet--except a few that drawled in a pretty, Southern way,
like Sally Woodburn's.
I could tell which were the poor things that Mrs. Ess Kay wanted to
weed out of her acquaintance-garden for next season, by the way she