He was going right on with their talk, where he had let it fall when the man’s cry came down to them.
“Yes,” he said, “the sunset’s all you say. Beautiful enough. But—there’s no life in it, no pith. It’s quiet, calm. It’s sleep, or death—the death of the day. Give me the rising sun, when the world takes fire from it. It spurs you, and drives you. When the sun sets, I want to go to bed.” He smiled at his own words. “When it’s rising, I want to drink, or fight, or make love to a woman.” And his cheeks reddened at that.
Ruth wanted to get away from him. She could not trust her tongue; it would betray her. She said huskily: “Then I’m going to come up and see the sun rise in the morning. Will you let me come?”
He said: “Of course. I’ll be on deck then, too.”
She fled from him, so swiftly that he was concerned, and wondered if he had hurt her. But she, face down on her bunk in her cabin, was thinking: “He said it made him want to make love to a woman. And I said I’d come up and see it with him. Oh, will he think I meant he must make love to me?”
She was disturbed and unhappy over that, until she began to wonder how he knew he wanted to make love to women as the sun rose. Had he ever done it? Who was the woman? And—how dared the man have done this thing?
“I won’t go on deck in the morning,” she told herself.
But she did.
The sunrise was what Dan had promised her it would be. The calm had held through the night; and the sea was burnished like bronze, over its blue, when the first light stole across the water. Dan on the quarter wondered whether the girl would come. Probably not. She would sleep through it all, drowsily warm and soft. He smiled as he thought of her, sleeping.
But she was not asleep. She was awake, telling herself she would not go up to the deck, and dressing as swiftly as nimble hands could manage her garments. Before the first gray of the sky had begun to warm with rose, Dan saw her at the top of the companion, a white shadow in the white light of morning.