Cemetery; but now they go in for rest cures and sea voyages,
and the baths at Carlsbad and specialists, these same being main
contributing causes to the present high cost of living, and also
helping to explain what becomes of some of those large life-insurance
policies you read about. Possibly you know the type I am
describing - the lady who, when planning where she will spend the
summer, sends for catalogues from all the leading sanatoriums.
We had one such person with us.
She had been surgically remodeled so many times that she dated
everything from her last operation. At least six times in her
life she had been down with something that was absolutely incurable,
and she was now going to Homburg to have one of the newest and
most fatal German diseases in its native haunts, where it would
be at its best. She herself said that she was but a mere shell;
and for the first few meals she ate like one - like a large, empty
shell with plenty of curves inside it.
However, when, after a subsequent period of seclusion, she emerged
from her stateroom wearing the same disheveled look that Jonah
must have worn when he and the whale parted company, do you think
she would confess she had been seasick? Not by any means! She said
she had had a raging headache. But she could not fool me. She
had the stateroom next to mine and I had heard what I had heard.
She was from near Boston and she had the near-Boston accent; and
she was the only person I ever met who was seasick with the broad
A.
Personally I abhor those evasions, which deceive no one. If I had
been seasick I should not deny it here or elsewhere. For a time
I thought I was seasick. I know now I was wrong - but I thought
so. There was something about the sardels served at lunch - their
look or their smell or something - which seemed to make them
distasteful to me; and I excused myself from the company at the
table and went up and out into the open air. But the deck was
unpleasantly congested with great burly brutes - beefy, carnivorous,
overfed creatures, gorged with victuals and smoking disgustingly
strong black cigars, and grinning in an annoying and meaning sort
of way every time they passed a body who preferred to lie quiet.
The rail was also moving up and down in a manner that was annoying
and wearisome for the eye to watch - first tipping up and up and up
until half the sky was hidden, then dipping down and down and down
until the gray and heaving sea seemed ready to leap over the side
and engulf us.
