Further, there was hardly an article of ship’s use, from the windlass to the bosun’s chair, but she had metamorphosed it into some sort of furniture: a table or a bed or a lamp or a tea-set: and marked it as her property: and what she had marked as her property no one might touch⁠—if she could prevent it. To parody Hobbes, she claimed as her own whatever she had mixed her imagination with; and the greater part of her time was spent in angry or tearful assertions of her property-rights.

Her other interest was moral. She had an extraordinary vivid, simple sense, that child, of Right and Wrong⁠—it almost amounted to a precocious ethical genius. Every action, her own or anyone else’s, was immediately judged good or bad, and uncompromisingly praised or blamed. She was never in doubt.