Down she looked into the depth of the sea.  While it was slightly disturbed on the surface by the passage of the Euphrosyne, beneath it was green and dim, and it grew dimmer and dimmer until the sand at the bottom was only a pale blur.  One could scarcely see the black ribs of wrecked ships, or the spiral towers made by the burrowings of great eels, or the smooth green-sided monsters who came by flickering this way and that.

—­“And, Rachel, if any one wants me, I’m busy till one,” said her father, enforcing his words as he often did, when he spoke to his daughter, by a smart blow upon the shoulder.

“Until one,” he repeated.  “And you’ll find yourself some employment, eh?  Scales, French, a little German, eh?  There’s Mr. Pepper who knows more about separable verbs than any man in Europe, eh?” and he went off laughing.  Rachel laughed, too, as indeed she had laughed ever since she could remember, without thinking it funny, but because she admired her father.

But just as she was turning with a view perhaps to finding some employment, she was intercepted by a woman who was so broad and so thick that to be intercepted by her was inevitable.  The discreet tentative way in which she moved, together with her sober black dress, showed that she belonged to the lower orders; nevertheless she took up a rock-like position, looking about her to see that no gentry were near before she delivered her message, which had reference to the state of the sheets, and was of the utmost gravity.

“How ever we’re to get through this voyage, Miss Rachel, I really can’t tell,” she began with a shake of her head.  “There’s only just sheets enough to go round, and the master’s has a rotten place you could put your fingers through.  And the counterpanes.  Did you notice the counterpanes?  I thought to myself a poor person would have been ashamed of them.  The one I gave Mr. Pepper was hardly fit to cover a dog. . . .  No, Miss Rachel, they could not be mended; they’re only fit for dust sheets.  Why, if one sewed one’s finger to the bone, one would have one’s work undone the next time they went to the laundry.”

Her voice in its indignation wavered as if tears were near.

There was nothing for it but to descend and inspect a large pile of linen heaped upon a table.  Mrs. Chailey handled the sheets as if she knew each by name, character, and constitution.  Some had yellow stains, others had places where the threads made long ladders; but to the ordinary eye they looked much as sheets usually do look, very chill, white, cold, and irreproachably clean.

Suddenly Mrs. Chailey, turning from the subject of sheets, dismissing them entirely, clenched her fists on the top of them, and proclaimed, “And you couldn’t ask a living creature to sit where I sit!”

Mrs. Chailey was expected to sit in a cabin which was large enough, but too near the boilers, so that after five minutes she could hear her heart “go,” she complained, putting her hand above it, which was a state of things that Mrs. Vinrace, Rachel’s mother, would never have dreamt of inflicting—­Mrs. Vinrace, who knew every sheet in her house, and expected of every one the best they could do, but no more.