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right hand. With her left she struck out for the ship’s rope ladder, sinking into the water under a mass of bubbles and crosscurrents eddying like hairs drawn across the surface. She rose some ten feet farther on. Dripping seawater like one come back from the dead, with eighteen inches of leather crowned with a heavy brass buckle in her right hand, her left gripping the rope and her knife between her teeth (where else?) she began to climb.
    The watch—who saw her first—saw somebody entirely undistinguished. She was wringing the water out of her skirt. She sprang erect as she caught sight of him, burying both hands in the heavy folds of her dress.
    “We-ell!” said he.
    She said nothing, only crouched down a little by the rail. The leather belt, hidden in her right—her stronger—hand began to stir. He came closer—he stared—he leaned forward—he tapped his teeth with his forefinger. “Eh, a pussycat!” he said. She didn’t move. He stepped back a pace, clapped his hands and shouted; and all at once she was surrounded by men who had come crack! out of nothing, sprung in from the right, from the left, shot up from the deck as if on springs, even tumbling down out of the air. She did not know if she liked it.
    “Look!” said the watch, grinning as if he had made her up.
    Perhaps they had never seen a woman before, or perhaps they had never seen one bare-armed, or with her hair cut off, or sopping wet. They stared as if they hadn’t. One whistled, indrawn between his teeth, long and low. “What does she want?” said someone. The watch took hold of her arm and the sailor who had whistled raised both hands over his head and clasped them, at which the crowd laughed.
    “She thinks we’re hot!”
    “She wants some, don’t you, honey?”
    “Ooh, kiss me, kiss me, dearie!”
    “I want the captain!” she managed to get out. All around crowded men’s faces: some old, some young, all very peculiar to her eyes with their unaccustomed whiskers, their chins, their noses, their loose collars. It occurred to her that she did not like them a bit. She did not exactly think they were behaving badly, as she was not sure how they ought to behave, but they reminded her uncannily of her husband, of whom she was no longer at all afraid. So when the nearest winked and reached out two hands even huger than the shadow of hands cast on the deck boards, she kicked him excruciatingly in the left knee (he fell down), the watch got the belt buckle round in a circle from underneath (up, always up, especially if you’re short), which gave him a cut across the cheek and a black eye; this leaves her left hand still armed and her teeth, which she used. It’s good to be able to do several things at once. Forward, halfway from horizon to zenith, still and clear above the black mass of the rigging and the highest mast, burned the constellation of the Hunter, and under that—by way of descent down a monumental fellow who had just that moment sprung on board—frothed and foamed a truly fabulous black beard. She had just unkindly set someone howling by trampling on a tender part (they were in good spirits, most of them, and fighting one another in a heap; she never did admit later to all the things she did in that melee) when the beard bent down over her, curled and glossy as a piece of the sea. Children never could resist that beard. Big one looked at little one. Little one looked at big one. Stars shone over his head. He recognized her at once, of course, and her look, and the pummeling she had left behind her, and the cracked knee, and all the rest of it. “So,” he said, “you’re a fighter, are you!” He took her hands in his and crushed them, good and hard; she smiled brilliantly, involuntarily.
    When she fenced with him (she insisted on fencing with him) she worked with a hard, dry persistence that surprised him. “Well, I have got your—and you have got my teaching,” he said philosophically at first, “whatever you may