His charm
is infinite; his manners are of a delicacy and an aplomb. His
speech, when he is of waggish humour, carries a tincture of Queen
Anne phraseology that is subtle and droll. A man, indeed! _L'extreme
de charme_, as M. Djer-Kiss loves to say what time he woos the
public in the theatre programmes.
The first thrill was when Bowling Green, Esq., secretary, cast an
eye upward as the club descended from the Fourteenth Street
sharabang, and saw, over the piers, the tall red funnels of the
_Aquitania_. This is going to be great doings, said he to himself. O
Cunard Line funnels! What is there that so moves the heart?
Bowling Green, Esq., confesses that it is hard to put these minutes
into cold and calculated narrative. Among ships and seafaring
concerns his heart is too violently stirred to be quite _maitre de
soi_.
The club moved forward. Welcomed by the suave commissionaire of the
Cunard Line, it was invited to rise in the elevator. On the upper
floor of the pier the members ran to the windows. There lay the
_Aquitania_ at her pier. The members' hearts were stirred. Even the
doctor, himself a hardened man of the sea, showed a brilliant spark
of emotion behind his monocular attic window. A ship in dock--and
what a ship! A ship at a city pier, strange sight. It is like a lion
in a circus cage. She, the beauty, the lovely living creature of
open azure and great striding ranges of the sea, she that needs
horizons and planets for her fitting perspective, she that asks the
snow and silver at her irresistible stern, she that persecutes the
sunset across the purple curves of the longitudes--tied up stiff and
dead in the dull ditch of a dockway.
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