The Colmannia had been in long enough to have made her toilet for the
outward voyage, and was looking her best. She was tipped and edged with
shining brass, without and within, and was red-carpeted and white-painted
as only a ship knows how to be. A little uniformed steward ran before the
visitors, and showed them through the dim white corridors into typical
state-rooms on the different decks; and then let them verify their first
impression of the grandeur of the dining-saloon, and the luxury of the
ladies' parlor and music-room. March made his wife observe that the
tables and sofas and easy-chairs, which seemed so carelessly scattered
about, were all suggestively screwed fast to the floor against rough
weather; and he amused himself with the heavy German browns and greens
and coppers in the decorations, which he said must have been studied in
color from sausage, beer, and spinach, to the effect of those large
march-panes in the roof. She laughed with him at the tastelessness of the
race which they were destined to marvel at more and more; but she made
him own that the stewardesses whom they saw were charmingly like
serving-maids in the 'Fliegende Blatter'; when they went ashore she
challenged his silence for some assent to her own conclusion that the
Colmannia was perfect.
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