"What is it? Oh, what is it?" his wife demanded of March's share of their
common ignorance. A young fellow passing stopped, as if arrested by the
tragic note in her voice, and explained that the woman had left three
little children locked up in her tenement while she came to bid some
friends on board good-by.
He passed on, and Mrs. March said, "What a charming face he had!" even
before she began to wreak upon that wretched mother the overwrought
sympathy which makes good women desire the punishment of people who have
escaped danger. She would not hear any excuse for her. "Her children
oughtn't to have been out of her mind for an instant."
"Don't you want to send back a line to ours by the pilot?" March asked.
She started from him. "Oh, was I really beginning to forget them?"
In the saloon where people were scattered about writing pilot's letters
she made him join her in an impassioned epistle of farewell, which once
more left none of the nothings unsaid that they had many times
reiterated. She would not let him put the stamp on, for fear it would not
stick, and she had an agonizing moment of doubt whether it ought not to
be a German stamp; she was not pacified till the steward in charge of the
mail decided.
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