On the homeward steamer she had as a traveling companion a young Englishman whom she had met at Los Angeles, one Anthony Dasent, an engineer of some distinction.  He was bronzed and healthy and lithe-limbed.  She liked him because he had brains and looked her squarely in the face.  On the first evening of the voyage a slight lurch of the vessel caused her to slip, and she would have fallen had he not caught her by the arms.  For the first time she realized how strong a man could be.  It was a new sensation, not unpleasurable, and in thanking him she blushed.  He remained with her on deck, and talked of their California friends and the United States.  The next day he established himself by her side, and discoursed on the sea and the sky, human aspirations, the discomforts of his cabin, and a belief in eternal punishment.  The day after that he told her of his ambitions, and showed her photographs of his mother and sisters.  After that they exchanged views on the discipline of loneliness.  His profession, he observed, took him to the waste places of the earth, where there was never a woman to cheer him, and when he came back to England he returned to a hearth equally unconsoled.  Zora began to pity his forlorn condition.  To build strong bridges and lay down railroads was a glorious thing for a man to do; to do it without sweetheart or wife was nothing less than heroic.

In the course of time he told her that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever met.  He expressed his admiration of the gold flecks in her brown eyes and the gleams of gold in her hair when it was caught by the sun.  He also wished that his sisters could have their skirts cut like hers and could learn the art of tying a veil over a hat.  Then he took to scowling on inoffensive young men who fetched her wraps and lent her their binoculars.  He declared one of them to be an unmitigated ass to throw whom overboard would be to insult the Atlantic.  And then Zora recognized that he was stolidly in love with her after the manner of his stolid kind.  She felt frightened, and accused herself of coquetry.  Her sympathy with his barren existence had perhaps overstepped the boundaries of polite interest.  She had raised false hopes in a young and ingenuous bosom.  She worked herself up to a virtuous pitch of self-reprobation and flagellated herself soundly, taking the precaution, however, of wadding the knots of the scourge with cotton-wool.  After all, was it her fault that a wholesome young Briton should fall in love with her?  She remembered Rattenden’s uncomfortable words on the eve of her first pilgrimage:  “Beautiful women like yourself, radiating feminine magnetism, worry a man exceedingly.  You don’t let him go about in peace, so why should he let you?”

So Zora came face to face with the eternal battle of the sexes.  She stamped her foot in the privacy of her cabin, and declared the principle to be horrid and primeval and everything that was most revolting to a woman who had earnestly set forth to discover the highest things of life.  For the remainder of the voyage she avoided Anthony Dasent’s company as much as possible, and, lest he should add jealousy to the gloom in which he enveloped himself, sought unexciting joys in the society of a one-eyed geologist who discoursed playfully on the foraminifera of the Pacific slope.