The next time we met was six or eight years later; and this time the controversy was more serious. For now Jack had read “Love’s Pilgrimage,” and was exasperated by what seemed to him a still less excusable form of asceticism, that of sex. Here was a so-called hero, a prig of a poet, driving a young wife to unhappiness by notions born in the dark corners of Christian monkeries. I am not sure just how I defended poor Thyrsis; I am not sure how clearly I myself saw at that time the peculiar working of sex-idealism which had manifested itself in that novel; the impulse a man has to be ashamed of advantages given to him by nature and society, and so to put himself chivalrously under the feet of a woman--raising her, an image of perfection, upon a pedestal of his own self-reproach. Sometimes she refuses to stay upon this pedestal; and so results a comical plight for a too-imaginative ascetic! The argument between Jack and myself was handicapped on that occasion by the fact that his voice was almost entirely gone because of a sore throat. He was trying the alcohol treatment; my last picture of him in the flesh was very much of the flesh, alas!--with a flask of gin before him, and the stumps of many cigarettes in his dinner-plate, and his eyes red and unwholesome-looking. He has told the story of his travels in the Kingdom of Alcoholia himself, told it bravely and completely, so I am not obliged to use any reserve in speaking of this aspect of his life. I went away, more than ever confirmed as a mollycoddle! But Jack London was a man with a magnificent mind, and a giant’s will. He fought tremendous battles in his own soul--battles in despite of his own false philosophy, battles which he was fighting even while he was quarreling at other men’s self-restraint. He went on a trip around the Horn, which lasted several months, and drank nothing all that time; also, he wrote that shining book, “John Barleycorn,” one of the most useful and most entertaining ever penned by a man. It was our habit to send each other our new books, and to exchange comments on them. When I read “John Barleycorn” I wrote that the book had made me realize a new aspect of the drink problem, a wrong it did to men who never touched it--in depriving them of companionship, making them exiles among their fellows. So much of men’s intercourse depends upon and is colored by drinking! I, for example, had always felt that my friendship with Jack London had been limited by that disharmony.