And Mr.Powell, being young, thought naively that the captain being married, there could be no occasion for anxiety as to his condition.

I suppose that to him life, perhaps not so much his own as that of others, was something still in the nature of a fairy-tale with a 'they lived happy ever after' termination.

We are the creatures of our light literature much more than is generally suspected in a world which prides itself on being scientific and practical, and in possession of incontrovertible theories.

Powell felt in that way the more because the captain of a ship at sea is a remote, inaccessible creature, something like a prince of a fairy-tale, alone of his kind, depending on nobody, not to be called to account except by powers practically invisible and so distant, that they might well be looked upon as supernatural for all that the rest of the crew knows of them, as a rule.
So he did not understand the aggrieved attitude of the mate--or rather he understood it obscurely as a result of simple causes which did not seem to him adequate.

He would have dismissed all this out of his mind with a contemptuous: 'What the devil do I care ?' if the captain's wife herself had not been so young.