olidity.
She wished he would grow angry, wished even that he might be angry with
her.... She wished for anything to break the long days of deadly calm.
And she watched Joel more intently than it is well for wife to watch
husband, or for husband to watch wife.

He did so many things that tried her sore. He had a fashion, when he had
finished eating, of setting his hands against the table and pushing
himself back from the board with slow and solid satisfaction. She came to
the point where she longed to scream when he did this. When they were at
table in the main cabin, she watched with such agony of trembling nerves
for that movement of his that she forgot to eat, and could not relish
what she ate.

Joel was a man, and his life was moving smoothly. His ship's casks were
filling more swiftly than he had any right to hope; his wife was at his
side; his skies were clear. He was happy, and comfortable, and well
content. Sometimes, when they were preparing for sleep, at night, in the
cabin at the stern, he would relax on the couch there. But she did not
wish for him to put his feet upon the cushions; she said that his shoes
were dirty. He offered to take off his shoes; and she shuddered....

He had a fashion of stretching and yawning comfortably as he bade her
good night; and sometimes a yawn caught him in the middle of a word, and
he talked while he yawned. She hated this. She was passing through that
hard middle ground, that purgatory between maidenhood and wifehood in the
course of which married folk find each other only human, after all. And
she had not yet come to accept this condition, and to glory in it. She
had always thought of Joel as a hero, a protector, a fine, stalwart,
able, noble man. Now she forgot that he was commander of this ship and
master of the men aboard her, and saw in him only a man who, when work
was done, liked to take his ease--and who talked through his yawns.

She gnawed at this bone of discontent, in the hours when Joel was busy with
his work. She was furiously resentful of Joel's flesh-and-bloodness.... And
Joel, because he was too busy to be introspective, continued calmly happy
and content.

The whales led them past Easter Island for a space; and then, abruptly,
they were gone. Came day on day when the men at the masthead saw no misty
spout against the wide blue of the sea, no glistening black body lying
awash among the waves. And the Nathan Ross, with all hands scrubbing
white the decks