saw.  He brought the pulsing sea before them, and the men and the ships upon the sea.  He communicated his power of vision, till they saw with his eyes what he had seen.  He selected from the vast mass of detail with an artist’s touch, drawing pictures of life that glowed and burned with light and color, injecting movement so that his listeners surged along with him on the flood of rough eloquence, enthusiasm, and power.  At times he shocked them with the vividness of the narrative and his terms of speech, but beauty always followed fast upon the heels of violence, and tragedy was relieved by humor, by interpretations of the strange twists and quirks of sailors’ minds.

And while he talked, the girl looked at him with startled eyes.  His fire warmed her.  She wondered if she had been cold all her days.  She wanted to lean toward this burning, blazing man that was like a volcano spouting forth strength, robustness, and health.  She felt that she must lean toward him, and resisted by an effort.  Then, too, there was the counter impulse to shrink away from him.  She was repelled by those lacerated hands, grimed by toil so that the very dirt of life was ingrained in the flesh itself, by that red chafe of the collar and those bulging muscles.  His roughness frightened her; each roughness of speech was an insult to her ear, each rough phase of his life an insult to her soul.  And ever and again would come the draw of him, till she thought he must be evil to have such power over her.  All that was most firmly established in her mind was rocking.  His romance and adventure were battering at the conventions.  Before his facile perils and ready laugh, life was no longer an affair of serious effort and restraint, but a toy, to be played with and turned topsy-turvy, carelessly to be lived and pleasured in, and carelessly to be flung aside.  “Therefore, play!” was the cry that rang through her.  “Lean toward him, if so you will, and place your two hands upon his neck!” She wanted to cry out at the recklessness of the thought, and in vain she appraised her own cleanness and culture and balanced all that she was against what he was not.  She glanced about her and saw the others gazing at him with rapt attention; and she would have despaired had not she seen horror in her mother’s eyes—­fascinated horror, it was true, but none the less horror.  This man from outer darkness was evil.  Her mother saw it, and her mother was right.  She would trust her mother’s judgment in this as she had always trusted it in all things.  The fire of him was no longer warm, and the fear of him was no longer poignant.