n a couple of hours. One or two days at most would suffice
for both adventures. I had not yet mentioned my intention to Eveena.
During the voyage I had been much alone with her, and it was then only
that our real acquaintance began. Till then, however close our
attachment, we were, in knowledge of each other's character and
thought, almost as strangers. While her painful timidity had in some
degree worn off, her anxious and watchful deference was even more
marked than before. True to the strange ideas derived chiefly from her
training, partly from her own natural character, she was the more
careful to avoid giving the slightest pain or displeasure, as she
ceased to fear that either would be immediately and intentionally
visited upon herself. She evidently thought that on this account there
was the greater danger lest a series of trivial annoyances, unnoticed
at the time, might cool the affection she valued so highly. Diffident
of her own charms, she knew how little hold the women of her race
generally have on the hearts of men after the first fever of passion
has cooled. It was difficult for her to realise that her thoughts or
wishes could truly interest me, that compliance with her inclinations
could be an object, or that I could be seriously bent on teaching her
to speak frankly and openly. But as this new idea became credible and
familiar, her unaffected desire to comply with all that was expected
from her drew out her hitherto undeveloped powers of conversation, and
enabled me day by day to appreciate more thoroughly the real
intelligence and soundness of judgment concealed at first by her
shyness, and still somewhat obscured by her childlike simplicity and
absolute inexperience. In the latter respect, however, she was, of
course, at the less disadvantage with a stranger to the manners and
life of her world. A more perfectly charming companion it would have
been difficult to desire and impossible to find. If at first I had
been secretly inclined to reproach her with exaggerated timidity, it
became more and more evident that her personal fears were due simply
to that nervous susceptibility which even men of reputed courage have
often displayed in situations of sudden and wholly unfamiliar peril.
Her tendency to overrate all dangers, not merely as they affected
herself, but as they might involve others, and above all her husband,
I ascribed to the ideas and habits of thought now for so many
centuries hereditary among a