I would not own to myself that the sullen cast of my temper that day was due to Miss Temple; but secretly I was quite conscious that my mood was owing to her, and the mere perception of this was a new vexation to me. For what was this young lady to me? What could signify her coolness, her insolence, her cold and cutting disregard of me? We had barely exchanged a dozen words since we left the Thames. Though my admiration of her fine figure, her haughty face, her dark, tragic, passionate eyes was extravagantly great, it was hidden; she had not divined it; and she was therefore without the influence over my moods and emotions which she might have possessed had I known that she was conscious how deeply she fascinated me. She would not even give me a chance to thoroughly dislike her. The heart cannot steer a middle course with such a woman as she. Had her behaviour enabled me to hate her, I should have felt easy; but her conduct was of the marble-like quality of her features, hard and polished, and too slippery for the passions to set a footing upon. ‘Pshaw!’ thought I again and again, as I viciously hammered the ashes out of the bowl of my pipe on the forecastle rail, ‘am not I an idiot to be thinking of yonder woman in this fashion, musing upon her, speculating about her--a person who is absolutely as much a stranger to me as any fine lady driving past me in a London Park!’ Yet would I repeatedly catch myself stealing peeps at her from under the arch of the courses, hidden as I was right forward in the ship’s bows, while she was pacing the length of the poop with Mr. Colledge, or standing awhile to hold a conversation with her aunt and Captain Keeling, the nobility of her figure and the chilling lofty dignity of her bearing distinctly visible to me all that way off, and strongly defining her amongst the rest of the people who wavered and straggled about the deck.