"What would you say?" he retorted. "Recklessness! The vanity of
boasting in the evening to all their chums: 'We've just shipped in
that there Apse Family. Blow her. She ain't going to scare us.' Sheer
sailorlike perversity! A sort of curiosity. Well--a little of all that,
no doubt. I put the question to them in the course of the voyage. The
answer of the elderly chap was:
"'A man can die but once.' The younger assured me in a mocking tone that
he wanted to see 'how she would do it this time.' But I tell you what;
there was a sort of fascination about the brute."
Jermyn, who seemed to have seen every ship in the world, broke in
sulkily:
"I saw her once out of this very window towing up the river; a great
black ugly thing, going along like a big hearse."
"Something sinister about her looks, wasn't there?" said the man in
tweeds, looking down at old Jermyn with a friendly eye. "I always had
a sort of horror of her. She gave me a beastly shock when I was no more
than fourteen, the very first day--nay, hour--I joined her.
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