Mrs. Hawkins was a beautiful woman, a young woman, of course. She was, I think, two or three years younger than her husband and about as much older than I. She was very pleasant, as agreeable as she was beautiful; and she did not stand on ceremony as a captain’s wife is likely to do. I suppose this was partly because it was her first voyage and it may have been partly because we were all about the same age; but it was mainly her own gracious nature. I, for my part, had not seen or met many women and I had never seen or met any woman like her. From a boy I had been to sea, and while I had been on ships where the captains had their wives along they had never been women of my own age. They had never been good-looking women, let alone being half so lovely as Keturah Hawkins, and I had never been aft as first officer and privileged to associate with them on terms of something resembling social equality. Of course, social equality is impossible on board a ship; but in so far as it could be brought about Mrs. Hawkins brought it about in the cabin of the _China Castle_. That and her beauty turned my head. She used to wear splendid jewels that her husband had got for her, though they were nothing to what he procured afterward, I judge, in the Orient. She had very fine blue eyes, a bright and flashing blue such as you see in midocean, particularly in the tropics in fine weather, the blue of deepest water. Her hair was a dark red, in great coils as thick as the heaviest rope cable aboard the ship, and her skin was a white that did not seem to tan or lose its whiteness from wind or weather, though sometimes a faint freckle or two would appear upon it. Her grandniece, though but a young girl, is wonderfully like her in every appearance. The sight of this girl tears me to pieces. It brings it all back. It brings back the hour in which I went clean out of my senses, sitting there alone in the cabin with Keturah Hawkins. She did not scream or struggle, but in a moment she ran away and bolted herself in her room. Of course when the Captain came down from the poop deck, where his regular pacing had been audible over our heads all this time, she told him.