"Hideous things! ... Will those cases be coffee?"
"I think so.... We'll chance one anyway.... And those small casks are rice. We're doing famously. Is there anything else you would like?"
"Heaps of things—spoons, forks, plates, stockings——"
"Here are stockings——" and he delved into his chest again.
"Truly—but twenty sizes too large. These boxes all seem to have belonged to men. Let us get home before those awful birds come back."
So they returned to the raft and pushed it slowly along the pile, from place to place, where the various portions of their cargo stood awaiting them, and Wulfrey wrestled manfully with casks and barrels and boxes in a way that would have astonished himself mightily three months before. And The Girl, eager to help as far as she could—brushing shoulders with him as they hauled and lifted, their hands overlapping at times, their bare arms in closest contact as they struggled with the insensate obstinacy of dead weights,—was very conscious of the play of the corded muscles in his arms and back, and the energy and determination of the quiet resolute face. And she was at once grateful and exultant in the knowledge that all the powers this man possessed were at her service, and that, if occasion should arise, they would be expended for her to the uttermost and without hesitation.
She experienced sensations entirely new to her. She found them good. They quickened her blood and stimulated her mind. She had seen much of men, more perhaps than most for her years, but men of a very different type,—unmuscular, powdered and peruked and befrilled, with airs and graces and velvet coats which hid the lack of virility within, and did duty for it to the world at large; men of wealth and highest culture and too often of meanest heart, self-seeking, intent only on their personal satisfactions, self-forgetful only in the pursuit of ignoble ends.
In every particular so different from this man. She had met but very few men whom she felt she could trust implicitly. Some of the most apparently sincere had proved the least worthy. And they were the most dangerous. They drew your trust, and so disarmed and then most treacherously betrayed you. Oh, she had seen it, time and again, and so her mind had come to look on men in general as beasts of prey, to be dreaded, and avoided except in the most open and superficial fashion.
But this was a man of another world. She had met none like him. He roused her and soothed her as none of those others ever had done, as no man before had ever done.
She had seen men as good-looking, perhaps, but in a very different way. Would they have looked as well, stripped of their trappings? She doubted it. And never a man among them could or would, she was sure, have handled these obdurate barrels and boxes as this man did. Truly they seemed to object to removal from their lodging-places as though they were endowed with minds of their own.