CHAPTER X
That evening the three men of us had dinner alone, with racks on the table, while the Elsinore rolled in the calm that had sent Miss West to her room.
“ You won’t see her for a couple of days,” Captain West told me. “Her mother was the same way—a born sailor, but always sick at the outset of a voyage.”
“ It’s the shaking down.” Mr. Pike astonished me with the longest observation I had yet heard him utter at table. “Everybody has to shake down when they leave the land. We’ve got to forget the good times on shore, and the good things money’ll buy, and start watch and watch, four hours on deck and four below. And it comes hard, and all our tempers are strung until we can make the change. Did it happen that you heard Caruso and Blanche Arral this winter in New
