He felt, poor wastrel, poor burnt moth, that his life had touched romance, that it was a part of all high beauty, that some little tongue of flame had sealed him. He had loved unavailingly, he thought, but with all the lovely part of him. Now that he was broken by excess he felt like the king in the tale, who, wanting one thing, had given up all things, that the grass might be the sooner over him. Vice and poverty had given him a wide knowledge of life; but of life in its hardness and cynicism, stripped of its flowers. His one fond memory, his one hopeless passion, as he called it, the one time in his life when he had lived emotionally, had given him, strangely enough, an odd understanding of women, which made him sympathetic to them. His ill-health gave him a distaste for life, particularly for society. He avoided people, and sought for individuals; he hated men, and loved his master; he despised women, in spite of his memory of a woman; but he found individual women more attractive than they would have liked to think. Intellectually, he was nothing; for he had never grown up; he had never come to manhood. As a boy he had had the vices of a man; as a man he had, in consequence, the defects of a woman. He was a broken, emotional creature, attractive and pathetic, the stick of a rocket which had blazed across heaven. He was at once empty and full of tenderness, cruel and full of sympathy, capable of rising, on his feelings, to heroic self-sacrifice; but likely, perhaps on the same day, to sink to depths of baseness. He was tall and weedy-looking, very wretched and haggard. He delighted in brilliant clothes, and spent much of his little store in mercers’ shops. He wore a suit of dark blue silk, heavily laced at the throat and wrists. The sleeves of his coat were slashed, so as to show a bright green satin lining; for, like most vicious men, he loved the colour green, and delighted in green clothes. He drooped forward as he walked, with his head a little on one side. His clumsy, ineffectual hands hung limply from thin wrists in front of him. But always, as he walked, the tired brain, too tired to give out, took in unceasingly, behind the mask of the face. He had little memory for events, for words spoken to him, for the characters of those he met; but he had instead a memory for places which troubled his peace, it was so perfect. As he walked softly up and down the poop with Captain Cammock that lovely morning, he took into his brain a memory of Salcombe harbour, so quiet below its combes, which lasted till he died. Often afterwards, when he was in the strange places of the world, the memory of the ships came back to him, he heard the murmur of the tide, the noise of the gulls quarrelling, the crying out of sailors at work. A dog on one combe chased an old sheep to the hedge above the beach of the estuary.