And
captain and ship bored her. He wanted to loom important as
master of one of the innumerable domestic craft that make up the
great fleet of society. It seemed to her a ridiculous armada of
tubs jostling in futility. She felt no belief in it. She jeered
at him as master of the house, master of their dual life. And he
was black with shame and rage. He knew, with shame, how her
father had been a man without arrogating any authority.

He had gone on the wrong tack, and he felt it hard to give up
the expedition. There was great surging and shame. Then he
yielded. He had given up the master-of-the-house idea.

There was something he wanted, nevertheless, some form of
mastery. Ever and anon, after his collapses into the petty and
the shameful, he rose up again, and, stubborn in spirit, strong
in his power to start afresh, set out once more in his male
pride of being to fulfil the hidden passion of his spirit.

It began well, but it ended always in war between them, till
they were both driven almost to madness. He said, she did not
respect him. She laughed in hollow scorn of this. For her it was
enough that she loved him.

"Respect what?" she asked.

But he always answered the wrong thing. And though she
cudgelled her brains, she could not come at it.

"Why don't you go on with your wood-carving?" she said. "Why
don't you finish your Adam and Eve?"

But she did not care for the Adam and Eve, and he never put
another stroke to it. She jeered at the Eve, saying, "She is
like a little marionette. Why is she so small? You've made Adam
as big as God, and Eve like a doll."

"It is impudence to say that Woman was made out of Man's
body," she continued, "when every man is born of woman. What
impudence men have, what arrogance!"

In a rage one day, after trying to work on the board, and
failing, so that his belly was a flame of nausea, he chopped up
the whole panel and put it on the fire. She did not know. He
went about for some days very quiet and subdued after it.

"Where is the Adam and Eve board?" she asked him.

"Burnt."

She looked at him.

"But your carving?"

"I burned it."

"When?"

She did not believe him.

"On Friday night."

"When I was at the Marsh?"

"Yes."

She said no more.

Then, when he had gone to work, she wept for a whole day, and
was much chastened in spirit. So that a new, fragile flame of
love came out of the ashes of this last pain.

Directly, it occurred to her that she wa