ne's morbid fancies I had let
myself in for some more severe exercise. And wasn't I sorry I spoke!
You know how I hate walking--at least on solid, rural earth; for I can
walk a ship's deck a whole foggy night through, if necessary, and think
little of it. There is some satisfaction too in playing the vagabond in
the streets of a big town till the sky pales above the ridges of the
roofs. I have done that repeatedly for pleasure--of a sort. But to
tramp the slumbering country-side in the dark is for me a wearisome
nightmare of exertion.

With perfect detachment Mrs Fyne watched me go out after her husband.
That woman was flint.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

"The fresh night had a smell of soil, of turned-up sods like a grave--an
association particularly odious to a sailor by its idea of confinement
and narrowness; yes, even when he has given up the hope of being buried
at sea; about the last hope a sailor gives up consciously after he has
been, as it does happen, decoyed by some chance into the toils of the
land. A strong grave-like sniff. The ditch by the side of the road
must have been freshly dug in front of the cottage. Once clear of the
garden Fyne gathered way like a racing cutter. What was a mile to him--
or twenty miles? You think he might have gone shrinkingly on such an
errand. But not a bit of it. The force of pedestrian genius I suppose.
I raced by his side in a mood of profound self-derision, and infinitely
vexed with that minx. Because dead or alive I thought of her as a
minx..."

I smiled incredulously at Marlow's ferocity; but Marlow pausing with a
whimsically retrospective air, never flinched.

"Yes, yes. Even dead. And now you are shocked. You see, you are such
a chivalrous masculine beggar. But there is enough of the woman in my
nature to free my judgment of women from glamorous reticency. And then,
why should I upset myself? A woman is not necessarily either a doll or
an angel to me. She is a human being, very much like myself. And I
have come across too many dead souls lying so to speak at the foot of
high unscaleable places for a merely possible dead body at the bottom of
a quarry to strike my sincerity dumb."

The cliff-like face of the quarry looked forbiddingly impressive. I
will admit that Fyne and I hung back for a moment before we made a
plunge off the road into the bushes growing in a broad space at the foot
of the toweri