on the 'Diana' as with Morton Harland and his daughter, though they
were always uniformly kind to me and thoughtful of my comfort. But
between us there was 'a great gulf fixed,' though every now and
again Catherine Harland made feeble and pathetic efforts to cross
that gulf and reach me where I stood on the other side. But her
strength was not equal to the task,--her will-power was sapped at
its root, and every day she allowed herself to become more and more
pliantly the prey of Dr. Brayle, who, with a subconscious feeling
that I knew him to be a mere medical charlatan, had naturally warned
her against me as an imaginative theorist without any foundation of
belief in my own theories. I therefore shut myself within a fortress
of reserve, and declined to discuss any point of either religion or
science with those for whom the one was a farce and the other mere
materialism. At all times when we were together I kept the
conversation deliberately down to commonplaces which were safe, if
dull,--and it amused me not a little to see that at this course of
action on my part Mr. Harland was first surprised, then disappointed
and finally bored. And I was glad. That I should bore him as much as
he bored me was the happy consummation of my immediate desires. I
talked as all conventional women talk, of the weather, of our
minimum and maximum speed, of the newspaper 'sensations' and
vulgarities that were served up to us whenever we called at a port
for the mails,--of the fish that frequented such and such waters, of
sport, of this and that millionaire whose highland castle or
shooting-box was crammed with the 'elite' whose delight is to kill
innocent birds and animals,--of the latest fool-flyers in
aeroplanes,--in short, no fashionable jabberer of social inanities
could have beaten me in what average persons call 'common-sense
talk,'--talk which resulted after a while in the usual vagueness of
attention accompanied by smothered yawning. I was resolved not to