“What I fell in love with must have been nothing more than a myth, I guess,” she faltered. For time and silence were bringing her to deep and pitiless introspection. She had been just in the mood ... he had set her young girl fancy afire. But adversity was turning her into a woman, and she knew what it was to drink from a very bitter cup indeed.
Love flew out of the window. But the awful reality of Hagen’s Island could not be dispelled. Her dreams all glimmered out, too. But her husband remained, like a heavy dross of fact. With the shine gone, she was no longer blinded. There was bitter comfort in this.
If she still pleaded with him, it was no longer like a frightened doll. It might not, somehow, be too late, even now, she sometimes groped, if the Captain.... But time would mock her with its everlasting patience. “What a strange thing life is,” she mused.
One day she grasped his hands and gripped them tight. “Let me throw the stuff into the sea,” she urged. “Give me the pipe and all the things you use, and try....” But she could not, after all, quite face the look in his eyes without faltering, even though she had learned to speak so simply, from her heart.
“God help me!” he muttered brokenly. It sounded like a terrible amen in some ironic ritual of praise.
She braced herself with an immense effort of will, met his gaze again, and went on earnestly: “I’ll help you with the work—we’ll try to make a success of the island together, since the island has to be.” Yes, adversity was making a woman of her after its own inexorable pattern, and she was no longer hoodwinked by that curious superstition about a woman’s fingers and a man’s work....
On the point of reminding him of the fine things they had so often planned to do, a quite wonderful half inspired impulse came to her, and she said: “I’ve heard you speak many times of wanting to settle down somewhere in a cheerful little flat without bothering much if nothing ever happened. It used to seem to me as though I couldn’t endure a life like that; but now it’s really all the same to me. If you’d rather live that kind of a life, then it will suit me too, I guess. Anything you can fix your mind on strong enough, so you....”
In spite of everything, her words sounded a little hollow to her. Yet back of them was such burning sincerity, too; and she felt that she couldn’t go on living at all, after this, if he patted her head and laughed, or if he said: “Don’t worry, little girl!”