The Lighted Lamp a Novel

lly enjoyed less sweep than on smaller boats of the older type. It was the price they had to pay for the lessened motion. Robert ate and slept and talked and walked, and all of these, it seemed to him, he did prodigiously, and on a scale which only a week before would have appeared to him to be fairly extravagant. What his Aunt Matilda Pendexter would have thought of all this self-indulgence, Robert did not allow himself to ask. Even he was almost frightened to find how much he liked the idleness, and what an undoubtedly comfortable feeling the unaccustomed luxuriousness of his present life gave him. To get up when he pleased, to do what he liked all day, to take a whole hour for luncheon if the talk made it seem worth while, to sleep whenever he felt inclined, to read books in the morning, to play shuffle-board of an afternoon, even to wear the despised cutaway coat of a week-day, were all too novel and too much of a contrast to the alternating monotony of Doane Street and Pinckney Street, not to force themselves oddly and frequently upon his attention. The other passengers seemed to take all these things forgranted, and to be for the most part unaware that there was a more humdrum, work-a-day aspect to life. They would probably have failed to understand the source of Robert's buoyant pleasure quite as completely as Robert himself failed to .comprehend their own daily customs and modes of thought. We must, of course, except the romantic school-girls. As we hav... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.