He could still see her, though, a thickly set girl--was she sixteen yet?--with a rosy, impertinent face and hair loosely confined in a ribbon. Her name had been given her from the fact that a Balavan, a master of ships, had in the eighteenth century discovered pepper growing wild on the coast of Sumatra. But there was now, Epes told himself, a far better reason--heaven knew she was peppery. Rather a detestable child. Far from being disconcerted by the brevity of his retort she replied that she had heard it didn’t matter what he understood or didn’t understand about the sea--“Now that you are to be a clerk.” After the stress, the difficulty of his homecoming, and from Sumatra, this was positively too much; and all the bitterness banked up by his father’s unassailable situation fell upon her. “All your life,” he asserted, “you have been a joke, with your language like a crazy ship chandler. You have never been in the least feminine or attractive, and you never can be, not by the width of a finger nail. Part of it--being built like a sampan--you can’t help; but that won’t help you, will it? But you might, at least, get a vocabulary that ought to suit you better. All I say is, you’ll notice, that it ought to. What suits you I shouldn’t try to guess. That’s mostly what I think about you; but on this other subject, where my private affairs, perhaps sorrows, are concerned, shut up.” This ill-tempered, rasped conclusion came so abruptly that it surprised even him. He glanced at her a shade regretfully, and saw with a feeling of satisfaction that once, anyhow, he had impressed, silenced her. Her head was bent, her face obscured by her forward-swung hair; her slippers were very rigidly together. “I suppose you are right,” she admitted after a long breath. “Probably you won’t believe it, but I have never thought much about myself or how I affected people. Yes, a lot of them--and you, too--must think I am a joke. So few care for anything as I do for the sea. It used to seem to me that perhaps you did; I was wrong though.” “Didn’t I tell you to let me alone?” he cried, again furious. “How do you know what I care for? What do you mean by daring to judge me, you--you----” “Aren’t you leaving the sea for your father’s counting-house?” Sumatra calmly demanded of him. “If I am it’s because my duty is there,” he replied miserably. “You are the hell of a sailor,” she commented. Ever since she could walk Sumatra had, on occasion, sworn; at times it had amused Epes Calef, but now it only added to his dislike, his condemnation of her. She should not, he told her severely, have been encouraged to continue it. Her answer was the expressed reflection that he might do better on shore; his delicacy was much too great for salt water. “Do you honestly hate me?” she asked unaccountably. “I mean, when you are not in a rage.”