satisfaction by a half-bashful laugh. The mate mused on:
'And of course you haven't known the ship as she used to be. She was
more than a home to a man. She was not like any other ship; and Captain
Anthony was not like any other master to sail with. Neither is she now.
But before one never had a care in the world as to her--and as to him,
too. No, indeed, there was never anything to worry about.'

Young Powell couldn't see what there was to worry about even then. The
serenity of the peaceful night seemed as vast as all space, and as
enduring as eternity itself. It's true the sea is an uncertain element,
but no sailor remembers this in the presence of its bewitching power any
more than a lover ever thinks of the proverbial inconstancy of women. And
Mr. Powell, being young, thought naively that the captain being married,
there could be no occasion for anxiety as to his condition. I suppose
that to him life, perhaps not so much his own as that of others, was
something still in the nature of a fairy-tale with a 'they lived happy
ever after' termination. We are the creatures of our light literature
much more than is generally suspected in a world which prides itself on
being scientific and practical, and in possession of incontrovertible
theories. Powell felt in that way the more because the captain of a ship
at sea is a remote, inaccessible creature, something like a prince of a
fairy-tale, alone of his kind, depending on nobody, not to be called to
account except by powers practically invisible and so distant, that they
might well be looked upon as supernatural for all that the rest of the
crew knows of them, as a rule.

So he did not understand the aggrieved attitude of the mate--or rather he
understood it obscurely as a result of simple causes which did not seem
to him adequate. He would have dismissed all this out of his mind with a
contemptuous: 'What the devil do I care?' if the captain's wife herself
had not been so young. To see her the first time had been something of a
shock to him. He had some preconceived ideas as to captain's wives
which, while he did not believe the 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
describ