suffocating. I don't see how you stand it."

"It does get stuffy in here when we run with the wind," Benton admitted.
"Cuts off our ventilation. I'm used to it. Crawl out the window and sit
on the forward deck. Don't try to get aft. You might slip off, the way
she's lurching."

Curled in the hollow of a faked-down hawser with the clean air fanning
her, Stella recovered herself. The giddiness left her. She pitied Sam
Davis back in that stinking hole beside the fire box. But she supposed
he, like her brother, was "used to it." Apparently one could get used to
anything, if she could judge by the amazing change in Charlie.

Far ahead loomed a ridge running down to the lake shore and cutting off
in a bold promontory. That was Halfway Point, Charlie had told her, and
under its shadow lay his camp. Without any previous knowledge of camps,
she was approaching this one with less eager anticipation than when she
began her long journey. She began to fear that it might be totally
unlike anything she had been able to imagine, disagreeably so. Charlie,
she decided, had grown hard and coarsened in the evolution of his
ambition to get on, to make his pile. She was but four years younger
than he, and she had always thought of herself as being older and wiser
and steadier. She had conceived the idea that her presence would have a
good influence on him, that they would pull together--now that there
were but the two of them. But four hours in his company had dispelled
that illusion. She had the wit to perceive that Charlie Benton had
emerged from the chrysalis stage, that he had the will and the ability
to mold his life after his elected fashion, and that her coming was a
relatively unimportant incident.