hown a graceful interest, but with the
manner of a lovely voyager, brought down from sunny or starlit
contemplations on deck to humour the dry tastes of the captain. She
didn't care a bit for the cargo, or the purposes; she didn't care a bit
for any of his interests nor wish to share them; his interests, in so
far as specialized and unrelated to their romance, were, she intimated,
by every retreating grace--as of gathered-up skirts and a backward smile
for the captain in his prosy room--the captain's own particular manly
business; her business was to be womanly, that is, to be charming, to
feel the breeze in the sails, and to gaze at the stars. And though, now
for the first time he saw it, Kitty was not the happy, facilely
contented woman he had thought her, it was really as if the ship, with
weightier cargoes to carry, more distant ports to reach, had undergone a
transformation; throbbing and complicated machinery moved instead of
sails, and on its workaday decks Kitty strolled wistfully, missing the
sails, missing the romance, but missing only that.

He had accepted, helplessly, her interpretation of their specialised
existences, hoping only that hers might assume the significance that
would, perhaps, justify the old-fashioned separation of interests; but
no children came after the first, the child that died at birth, the
child that his heart ached over still; and he could not believe that
Kitty felt the lack, could hardly believe that she shared his hope for
other children. She had suffered terribly in the birth of the one, more,
perhaps, than in its death--though that had temporarily crushed her--and
she had been horribly frightened by the cruelties and perils of
maternity. So, though he had come to think of her as essentially
womanly, it was in a rather narrow sense; the term had by degrees lost
many, even, of its warm, instinctive associations, and as he now sat
thinking, near the summer-house, it took on its narrowest, if most
piteous meaning. Kitty was essentially womanly. She needed some one to
be in love with her. Her husband had ceased to be in love--though he had
not ceased to be a loving husband--and she responded helplessly to a
lover's appeal. Sir Walter's appeal was very persuasive. A ship of
snowy, wing-like sails, a fairy ship, rocked on the waves at the very
edge of Kitty's sheltered life. Only a shutting of the eyes, a holding
of the breath, and she would be carried across the narrow intervening
dept