Mary Vanton read this letter with attention. The news it contained of her husband stirred her profoundly. At first she wondered if the career of Captain Vanton had had anything to do with Guy Vanton going to sea; but after some reflection she concluded it had not. Guy had always loved the sea, which was one of the reasons they had built the beach house she was living in. The sea had been a mutual bond between them--the sea and the beach. Fully half of the verse he had from time to time written dealt with the ocean, and he and she had shared a certain interpretation of it, that the sea was the last, the irremovable, the perpetual frontier on which the race of men could renew themselves, renew their hardihood, exhibit their courage, their daring, their resourcefulness, their faith. “The sea,” Guy had once avowed, “is the only frontier that never vanishes and never recedes. Men triumph over it: ‘A thousand fleets roll over thee in vain,’ and the same victory has to be won anew each time a ship sets sail. Steam and wireless and all sorts of other inventions make sea travel safer and easier and swifter only in the long run, and in the case of the ‘thousand fleets’--in the case of any single voyage or any single ship the actual risks, the possible hardships, the prerequisite of latent courage and absolute devotion on the part of the men who sail her, remain exactly the same as when the Phoenicians went forth in trading vessels and shuddered to go beyond the pillars of Hercules, into the dark, unknown ocean that rolled away to the end of the world.” This, he had argued, and Mary Vanton agreed with him, constituted the real immortality of the sea and the undying freshness of its adventure. They both felt that there was something in their attitude that wasn’t a part of the ordinary landsman’s attitude toward deep water. Both had been brought up in the tradition of tall ships and men who manned them. It showed in their outlook on life and their tastes in reading. Joseph Conrad was the passion of both. Although they agreed in thinking his greatest novel to be not a sea tale at all--“Nostromo”--they were of one mind respecting his finest story. Together they picked “Youth,” despite the apparent preponderance of critical opinion in favour of “Heart of Darkness.” Perhaps this was because in their own lives they had their heart of darkness; and in Guy’s case there must have been, in respect of “Youth,” an inextinguishable yearning for something he could hardly be said ever to have enjoyed in his own strange and sad experience.