It was a handsomer face, one that was more immediately pleasing.
But she did not like the mouth. It was made for kissing, and she
abhorred kisses. This was not a deliberately achieved concept; it came
to her in the form of a faint and vaguely intangible repulsion. For the
moment she knew a fleeting doubt of the man. Perhaps Sheldon was right
in his judgment of the other. She did not know, and it concerned her
little; for boats, and the sea, and the things and happenings of the sea
were of far more vital interest to her than men, and the next moment she
was staring through the warm tropic darkness at the loom of the sails and
the steady green of the moving sidelight, and listening eagerly to the
click of the sweeps in the rowlocks. In her mind's eye she could see the
straining naked forms of black men bending rhythmically to the work, and
somewhere on that strange deck she knew was the inevitable master-man,
conning the vessel in to its anchorage, peering at the dim tree-line of
the shore, judging the deceitful night-distances, feeling on his cheek
the first fans of the land breeze that was even then beginning to blow,
weighing, thinking, measuring, gauging the score or more of ever-shifting
forces, through which, by which, and in spite of which he directed the
steady equilibrium of his course.
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