You pass by and wonder what mysterious rites are going on in there, what prayers, what visions?
The privileged men, the lover, the husband, who are given the key of the sanctuary do not always know how to use it.

For myself, without claim, without merit, simply by chance I had been allowed to look through the half-opened door and I had seen the saddest possible desecration, the withered brightness of youth, a spirit neither made cringing nor yet dulled but as if bewildered in quivering hopelessness by gratuitous cruelty; self-confidence destroyed and, instead, a resigned recklessness, a mournful callousness (and all this simple, almost naive)--before the material and moral difficulties of the situation.

The passive anguish of the luckless! I asked myself: wasn't that ill-luck exhausted yet?
Ill-luck which is like the hate of invisible powers interpreted, made sensible and injurious by the actions of men?
Mr.Powell as you may well imagine had opened his eyes at my statement.
But he was full of his recalled experiences on board the _Ferndale_, and the strangeness of being mixed up in what went on aboard, simply because his name was also the name of a shipping-master, kept him in a state of wonder which made other coincidences, however unlikely, not so very surprising after all.
This astonishing occurrence was so present to his mind that he always felt as though he were there under false pretences.

And this feeling was so uncomfortable that it nerved him to break through the awe-inspiring aloofness of his captain.

He wanted to make a clean breast of it.