orts of his cabin, and a belief in
eternal punishment. The day after that he told her of his ambitions, and
showed her photographs of his mother and sisters. After that they exchanged
views on the discipline of loneliness. His profession, he observed, took
him to the waste places of the earth, where there was never a woman to
cheer him, and when he came back to England he returned to a hearth equally
unconsoled. Zora began to pity his forlorn condition. To build strong
bridges and lay down railroads was a glorious thing for a man to do; to do
it without sweetheart or wife was nothing less than heroic.

In the course of time he told her that she was the most beautiful woman he
had ever met. He expressed his admiration of the gold flecks in her brown
eyes and the gleams of gold in her hair when it was caught by the sun. He
also wished that his sisters could have their skirts cut like hers and
could learn the art of tying a veil over a hat. Then he took to scowling on
inoffensive young men who fetched her wraps and lent her their binoculars.
He declared one of them to be an unmitigated ass to throw whom overboard
would be to insult the Atlantic. And then Zora recognized that he was
stolidly in love with her after the manner of his stolid kind. She felt
frightened, and accused herself of coquetry. Her sympathy with his barren
existence had perhaps overstepped the boundaries of polite interest. She
had raised false hopes in a young and ingenuous bosom. She worked herself
up to a virtuous pitch of self-reprobation and flagellated herself soundly,
taking the precaution, however, of wadding the knots of the scourge with
cotton-wool. After all, was it her fault that a wholesome young Briton
should fall in love with her? She remembered Rattenden's uncomfortable
words on the eve of her first pilgrimage: "Beautiful women like yourself,
radiating feminine magnetism, worry a man exceedingly. You don't let him go
about in peace, so why should he let you?"

So Zora came face to face with the eternal battle of the sexes. She stamped
her foot in the privacy of her cabin, and declared the principle to be
horrid and primeval and everything that was most revolting to a woman who
had earnestly set forth to discover the highest things of life. For the
remainder of the voyage she avoided Anthony Dasent's company as much as
possible, and, lest he should add jealousy to the gloom in which he
enveloped himself, sought unexciting joys in the societ