sweeter than the gross adulation of the hell-believers, for the lovers mean what they utter.
They kept themselves carefully out of the way while the George Washington anchored in the harbour. Anatole knew how long the sealers would be about, therefore the pair sought another part of the coast, and worked as hard during the summer months, laying up and curing their stores for winter. After they had watched the schooner sail away, they carried their stock down to the cave and prepared.
During those summer months Eugene had laid in a store of health and strength that would last her for many a year. She often wondered at her own vitality, vigour and lightness. She had lost something of her velvety softness and delicacy perhaps, her cheeks were rougher, and her muscles harder, yet what once would have made her shrink and shiver and bend herself double with abject misery, now made her square her magnificent chest defiantly and exult. Those cold, fierce blasts no longer stung her like lead-tipped whips; they imparted vigour; she opened her fine nostrils and inhaled them with refreshment, and often bared her neck, now ruddy, to this rude but wholesome buffeting.
The vices of super-refinement and civilisation fell from her as a dead skin does after fever. Once chloral and absinthe were necessities to her vitiated system, now the Antarctic ozone was anodyne enough. She became a fresh woman, lusty, strong and ardent, like the goddesses of old, or the female field workers. Her breasts and limbs were bulwarks, and her heart a steady machine that did its work and sent warm blood rushing freely through her throbbing veins. She was no longer a lady filled with morbid fancies and unwholesomenesses, but a woman fervent and keen, with
