“You might have omitted that. Still, I’m glad you didn’t, because it shows how bravely truthful you are, and I love that in you better than anything else.”
I have always remembered that, Dorothy. I don’t know how far those who have left us know what we do; but I always think that if my father knows, he will be glad to have me perfectly truthful, and I love him so much that I would make any sacrifice to make him glad.
After he had read over what I had written, and had corrected a word here and there, I set to work to commit it to memory, so that I should never forget a line or a word of it. That is how it comes about that I am able to report it all to you exactly.
Now I know you are tired, so I am going to begin a new chapter, and you can rest as long as you like before reading it.
IT was Dorothy’s habit when reading a book to stop for an hour now and then, and devote that space to careful thinking. She explained her practice to Arthur one day, saying:—
“If a book be interesting, it is apt to dominate the mind, and sometimes to mislead the judgment. I think it well to suspend the reading now and then, and give myself a chance to shake off the glamour of the narrative, and to think out for myself what it means and to what it tends. One must do that, indeed, if one doesn’t want to surrender himself or herself completely to the dominance of an author’s thought, but chooses instead to do his or her own thinking.”
So Dorothy took an hour or two for thinking before going on with the reading of Evelyn’s book. Evelyn knew her habit, and she had recognised it by changing chapters at this point.
When Dorothy took up the pages again, she read as follows:—
WE stayed a long time among the whaling people, and they taught me many things. I learned from them how to tie all sorts of knots, and how to catch sea fish, and how to row, and best of all, how to sail a boat.
They were a curious kind of men. They swore all the time, in almost every sentence. But their swearing didn’t mean anything, and so it didn’t shock me in the least. They were not at all angry when they swore. They swore, I think, merely because they hadn’t any adjectives with which to express their thoughts. They called me a “damned nice gal,” and they meant it for a compliment. In the same way, they spoke of a tangle in a fish-line as “a damned ugly snarl,” or of a fish as “a damned big catch.” I suppose one might cure them of swearing by teaching them some adjectives. But nobody ever took the trouble to do that.