Second Scene: The Store-Room
Persons possessed of sluggish livers and tender hearts find two serious
drawbacks to the enjoyment of a cruise at sea. It is exceedingly difficult to get
enough walking exercise; and it is next to impossible (where secrecy is an object)
to make love without being found out. Reverting for the moment to the latter
difficulty only, life within the narrow and populous limits of a vessel may be
defined as essentially life in public. From morning to night you are in your
neighbor's way, or your neighbor is in your way. As a necessary result of these
conditions, the rarest of existing men may be defined as the man who is capable
of stealing a kiss at sea without discovery. An inbred capacity for stratagem of
the finest sort; inexhaustible inventive resources; patience which can flourish
under superhuman trials; presence of mind which can keep its balance
victoriously under every possible stress of emergency--these are some of the
qualifications which must accompany Love on a cruise, when Love embarks in
the character of a contraband commodity not duly entered on the papers of the
ship.
Having established a Code of Signals which enabled them to communicate
privately, while the eyes and ears of others were wide open on every side of
them, Natalie and Launce were next confronted by the more serious difficulty of
finding a means of meeting together at stolen interviews on board the yacht.
Possessing none of those precious moral qualifications already enumerated as
the qualifications of an accomplished lover at sea, Launce had proved unequal to
grapple with the obstacles in his way. Left to her own inventive resources, Natalie
had first suggested the young surgeon's medical studies as Launce's
unanswerable excuse for shutting himself up at intervals in the lower regions,
and had then hit on the happy idea of tearing her trimmings, and condemning
herself to repair her own carelessness, as the all-sufficient reason for similar acts
of self-seclusion on her side. In this way the lovers contrived, while the innocent
ruling authorities were on deck, to meet privately below them, on the neutral
