"I don't believe he would, unless he were helpless.... I wish he'd never come ashore."
"But in that case I would not be here either, and you would have been all alone for the rest of your life."
"Then, after all, I'm glad he came ashore."
"I wonder if you would have gone mad in time with the loneliness of it," she said musingly.
"It would be horrible to be all alone for all the rest of one's life, but I don't think I would have gone mad. I've no doubt there are books to be found among the wreckage out there. Still ... for the rest of one's life!"—and he shook his head doubtfully. "As things are, however...."
"As things are?" she queried, after waiting for him to finish.
"As things are, I am quite content to stop here for the rest of my life, if that has to be. But that won't stop my doing my best to get away if the chance offers.... And you?"
"If we were delivered from that man I could be content here also.... But I do not say for all my life. That sounds terribly long.... But for that man it would be a welcome retreat from a world of which I had had a surfeit."
He wondered much if she were heart-whole. It seemed almost incredible to him that she could have lived that strange life of hers without some man wanting and touching it. So fair a prize, to go wholly unclaimed and undesired! But never, in all her talk, had she said one word that pointed to anything of the kind. Rather had she held up the men she had met to derogation and contempt. Surely, if there had been anyone to whom her heart turned and clung, some evidence of it would have shown itself.
From all she had said, from all her little unconscious self-revelations, and the wholesome judgment he had formed of her in his own mind, he could well believe that, in that whirlpool of a world in which she had lived, she had come to hold most men in doubt and all at arm's length. And the thought was agreeable to him.