“Here am I, then, a man of irregular and spasmodic occupation, an unsatisfactory, useless member of society, I’ll admit, useless, but quite harmless; an educated man, what you would call an intellectual, not endowed with a brain of the good, sound type, but with a rambling, untidy sort of brain that is a curse to himself and a blessing to nobody. Here am I, without one responsibility in the world, with nothing to do unless I go out and forage for it, living alone with books, dabbling in this and that, and necessarily thrown for a certain number of hours each day on my own resources. You cannot wonder that my life of the imagination—as I will call it—becomes of supreme importance to me as my only companion. It had been a singularly blank life, so blank that when I went out for walks alone I used to fall back on repeating verse aloud, so you see it was a life of books, and man wants more than that. He wants something that shall be at once ideal and personal. There is only one thing which fulfils those two conditions: Woman. But, you will say, if there’s no woman in a man’s life he has only himself to blame. You’re right; I don’t know why I never set out to find myself a woman, perhaps because I was too hard to please, perhaps because I knew myself to be too fickle and restless. You used to laugh at me when I said this. Of course, I don’t pretend that there haven’t been incidents in my life; but they never lasted, never satisfied me for long; they weren’t even good to think about afterwards. Anyway, there I was: free, but lonely. “And now I had got this new, precious, incredible thing to think over. I am afraid to tell you how long I stayed at Sampiero, doing nothing, lapped in my thoughts as in a bath of warm water. My conversation with Ruth had been brief, and I knew every word of it by heart; my hour started from when I had come up to her house and had stolen surreptitiously to the doorway to take her unawares, and had stood there with a smile on my lips, waiting for her to look up. I saw again the light and the flowers and the baby in the cradle. I felt again the swimming in my head as I looked, for the first time, it seemed, into the beauty of her face. I heard again my own voice saying, ‘Ruth! Ruth! you must come with me.’ “But I told you all that before; why do I repeat it? Because I lived through it all an infinitude of times myself. I thought I couldn’t exhaust the richness of my treasure. Nor could I, but after a while I found that my perfect contentment was being gradually replaced by a hunger for something more; I was human; the imagination wasn’t enough. “I began to want Ruth, Ruth herself, warm and living, and when I made this discovery I took a step I had long since prepared in my mind, foreseeing the day when dissatisfaction would overcome me: I left Sampiero and joined a party that was going into Central Africa after ivory. III