he testimony of his
eyes, made him open them very wide. He had stared till the captain's
wife noticed it plainly and turned her face away. Captain's wife! That
girl covered with rugs in a long chair. Captain's...! He gasped
mentally. It had never occurred to him that a captain's wife could be
anything but a woman to be described as stout or thin, as jolly or
crabbed, but always mature, and even, in comparison with his own years,
frankly old. But this! It was a sort of moral upset as though he had
discovered a case of abduction or something as surprising as that. You
understand that nothing is more disturbing than the upsetting of a
preconceived idea. Each of us arranges the world according to his own
notion of the fitness of things. To behold a girl where your average
mediocre imagination had placed a comparatively old woman may easily
become one of the strongest shocks..."

Marlow paused, smiling to himself.

"Powell remained impressed after all these years by the very
recollection," he continued in a voice, amused perhaps but not mocking.
"He said to me only the other day with something like the first awe of
that discovery lingering in his tone--he said to me: `Why, she seemed so
young, so girlish, that I looked round for some woman which would be the
captain's wife, though of course I knew there was no other woman on
board that voyage.' The voyage before, it seems, there had been the
steward's wife to act as maid to Mrs Anthony; but she was not taken
that time for some reason he didn't know. Mrs Anthony...! If it
hadn't been the captain's wife he would have referred to her mentally as
a kid, he said. I suppose there must be a sort of divinity hedging in a
captain's wife (however incredible) which prevented him applying to her
that contemptuous definition in the secret of his thoughts."

I asked him when this had happened; and he told me that it was three
days after parting from the tug, just outside the channel--to be
precise. A head wind had set in with unpleasant damp weather. He had
come up to leeward of the poop, still feeling very much of a stranger,
and an untried officer, at six in the evening to take his watch. To see
her was quite as unexpected as seeing a vision. When she turned away
her head he recollected himself and dropped his eyes. What he could see
then was only, close to the long chair on which she reclined, a pair of
long, thin legs ending in black cloth boots tucked in close t