The capitals are Andrew’s—or Comfort’s. I merely transcribe and perspire. This Andrew, it appears, is a sea cook who has been mellowed and transfigured by exhaustive study of the Bhagavad Gītā, one of the sacred nonsense books of the Hindus. He doesn’t know who his father was, and he remembers his mother only as one dying in a strange city. When she finally passed away he took to the high seas and mastered marine cookery. Thus for many years, up and down the world. Then he went ashore at Manila and became chef to an army packtrain. Then he proceeded to China, to Japan. Then to India, where he entered the forestry service and plodded the Himalayan heights, always with the Bhagavad Gītā under his arm. At some time or other, during his years of culinary seafaring, he saved the life of a Yankee ship captain, and that captain, later dying, left him untold millions in South America. But it is long after all this is past that we have chiefly to do with him. He is now a young Monte Cristo at large in New York, a Monte Cristo worshiped and gurgled over by a crowd of mushy old maids, a hero of Uneeda-biscuit parties in God-forsaken studios, the madness and despair of senescent virgins. But it is not Andrew’s wealth that inflames these old girls, nor even his manly beauty, but rather his revolutionary and astounding sapience, his great gift for solemn and incomprehensible utterance, his skill as a metaphysician. They hang upon his every word. His rhetoric makes their heads swim. Once he gets fully under way, they almost swoon.... And what girls they are! Alas, what pathetic neck-stretching toward tinsel stars! What eager hearing of the soulful, gassy stuff! One of them has red hair and “wine dark eyes, now cryptic black, now suffused with red glows like the night sky above a prairie fire.” Another is “tall and lovely in a tragic, flower-like way” and performs upon the violoncello. A third is “a tanned woman rather variously weathered,” who writes stupefying epigrams about Whitman and Nietzsche—making the latter’s name Nietschze, of course! A fourth is “the Gray One”—O mystic appellation! A fifth—but enough! You get the picture. You can imagine how Andrew’s sagacity staggers these poor dears. You can see them fighting for him, each against all, with sharp, psychical excaliburs.