Page:My Life and Loves.djvu/117

Rh life vague misgivings came over me, a heartshaking suspicion that everything delightful and joyous in life had to be paid for—I wouldn't harbor the fear. If I had to pay, I'd pay; after all, the memory of the ecstasy could never be taken away while the sorrow was fleeting. And that faith I still hold.

Next day the Chief Steward allotted me a berth in a cabin with an English midshipman of seventeen going out to join his ship in the West Indies. William Ponsonby was not a bad sort, but he talked of nothing but girls from morning till night and insisted that negresses were better than white girls: they were far more passionate, he said.

He showed me his sex; excited himself before me, while assuring me he meant to have a Miss LeBreton, a governess who was going out to take up a position in Pittsburg.

"But suppose you put her in the family way?" I asked.

"That's not my funeral", was his answer, and seeing that the cynicism shocked me, he went on to say there was no danger if you withdrew in time. Ponsonby never opened a book and was astoundingly ignorant: he didn't seem to care to learn anything that hadn't to do with sex. He introduced me to Miss LeBreton the same evening. She was rather tall, with fair hair and blue eyes, and she praised my reciting. To my wonder she was a woman and pretty, and I could see by the way she looked at Ponsonby that she was more than a little in love with him. He was above middle height, strong and good-tempered, and that was all I could see in him.

Miss Jessie kept away the whole evening and when I saw her father on the "upper deck", he glowered at me and went past without a word. That night I told Ponsonby my story, or part of it, and he