ed 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 to the skylight seat.
Whence he concluded that the 'old gentleman,' who wore a grey cap like
the captain's, was sitting by her--his daughter. In his first
astonishment he had stopped dead short, with the consequence that now he
felt very much abashed at having betrayed his surprise. But he couldn't
very well turn tail and bo