Twice
he had been shipwrecked. Times innumerable he and all with him had been
threatened with death, and had escaped their doom by the narrowness of
a hair-breadth. He was always unwilling at the outset to speak of this
dark and dreadful side of his life: it was only by adroitly tempting
him, by laying little snares for him in his talk, that she lured him
into telling her of the terrors of the great deep. She sat listening to
him with a breathless interest, looking at him with a breathless wonder,
as those fearful stories--made doubly vivid by the simple language
in which he told them--fell, one by one, from his lips. His noble
unconsciousness of his own heroism--the artless modesty with which
he described his own acts of dauntless endurance and devoted courage,
without an idea that they were anything more than plain acts of duty
to which he was bound by the vocation that he followed--raised him to
a place in her estimation so hopelessly high above her that she became
uneasy and impatient until she had pulled down the idol again which
she herself had set up. It was on these occasions that she most rigidly
exacted from him all those little familiar attentions so precious to
women in their intercourse with men.
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