Restraint, then! A marriage is doubtless, as Chesterton so admirably puts it, a passionate compromise, but it does not follow that love is therefore a compromising debauchery. It may be that I, who have my ways far from feminine influence, tend to place women in a rarer and purer atmosphere than most of them breathe, and that this tendency unfits me for judging them accurately. Let it be so. Let my Welsh Divinity watch me from beyond the dust-clouds of learning with her grey eyes, while I pray never to lose my reverence for the quiet loveliness of which she is, so unconsciously, the type. XXXV Once more I am out at sea. I have stowed away my "shore gear," slipped the movable bar across my book-shelf, screwed up my windows, and made all snug against the wind blowing up-channel. There is a gentle roll; she is in ballast, for the Western Ocean, and the Mate does not smile when we discuss the probable weather. He would like a little more ballast, I know, and he thinks she "draws too much forrard." Well, I am minded to go on deck for a smoke before I turn in. And the Third Officer is on watch. I call him the Innovation. There is to be much tallying on this charter, and there is a happy rumour that the _Benvenuto_ will pay in future. "I hear," said my friend the Mate, "I hear, Mr. McAlnwick, that she has been reconstructed." By which he means that certain financial props have been introduced into her economy, and she is no longer in liquidation. The Mate glories in a four-hour watch, and the Innovation takes the eight to twelve. He walks across the bridge with a dozen swift strides. Then a peculiar slew of his active little frame, and he whirls back to starboard. His keen, clean-shaven face, hardened prematurely into an expression of relentless ferocity, looks out from the peak of his badge-cap, the strap cramming the crown against his bullet head. He is twenty-two, and pure Liverpool. He served his apprenticeship in sail on the Australian and Western American coasts. A middle class education is submerged beneath seven years at sea, seven years of unbridled lust, seven years of the seven deadly sins, seven years of joyous and impenitent animalism. There is no break in his voice when he speaks of "his old lady"--she is religious. His "old man" is "a hard case," another name for a Liverpool skipper. He met his brother this time at home--"didn't know him, mister. Hadn't seen him for six years." His knowledge of some things extends from Sydney and Melbourne to Marseilles and Hamburg, from Amsterdam to Valparaiso; he drinks Irish neat, and his conversation is blistered from end to end with blasphemous invocations of the name of the Son of God.