At the end she asked what rooms were left on the Norumbia, and the clerk whom they had fallen to looked through his passenger list with a shaking head.

He was afraid there was nothing they would like.
"But we would take anything," she entreated, and March smiled to think of his innocence in supposing for a moment that she had ever dreamed of not going.
"We merely want the best," he put in.

"One flight up, no noise or dust, with sun in all the windows, and a place for fire on rainy days." They must be used to a good deal of American joking which they do not understand, in the foreign steamship offices.

The clerk turned unsmilingly to one of his superiors and asked him some question in German which March could not catch, perhaps because it formed no part of a conversation with a barber, a bootmaker or a banker.

A brief drama followed, and then the clerk pointed to a room on the plan of the Norumbia and said it had just been given up, and they could have it if they decided to take it at once.
They looked, and it was in the very place of their room on the Colmannia; it was within one of being the same number.