It was not until the dusk, when his boat steamed into the shipping before Marseilles, that the old click-click of his mental tension was resumed and the thought-lights burned strong again. He found then that much which had been vague and unreckonable at Calcutta was cleared and finished, as often so pleasantly happens after a season of _pralaya_, as the Hindus express the period of rest, whether it be sleep or death. Standing well forward on deck, with the brilliance of the city pricking the dark of the offing, it was borne to Routledge that his life at this period had reached a parting of the ways. The divergences stretched out before him clearly, as if his mind had arranged them subconsciously, while his material faculties had drowsed in the lull of far journeying. Thoughts began to rain upon him. “Routledge, how are you and the world to hook up from now on?... You’ve played so far, just played, scattered your years all over the earth, with but little profit to yourself or to the world. If you should die to-night you would possibly have earned five lines in a thirty-volume encyclopædia: ‘Cosmo Routledge, American born, an English war-correspondent and traveller, rode with Tom, stood fire with Dick, and ran with Henry; undertook to study at first hand various native India affairs, and died of a fever at the edge of’--God knows what yellow desert or turbid river.” He smiled and lit his pipe, musing on. “The point is, I’ll be dead long before the fever--if I keep up this world-tramp--dead to myself and to men--one of the great unbranded, crossing and recrossing his trail around and around the world.... Shall I sit down in London or New York, and double on my whole trail so far on paper--books, editorials, special articles, long dinners beginning at eight, an hour of billiards, a desk in some newspaper office--fat, fatuous, and fixed at fifty?... Which is better, a gaunt, hungry, storm-bitten wanderer, with his face forever at the fire-lit window-panes of civilization, or a creased and cravatted master of little ceremonies within? A citizen of ordered days and nights, or an exile with the windy planet forever roaring in his skull?” They were warping his ship into dock, and the voices of France were thick in the night. “Routledge, you’re evading the issue,” he muttered after a moment. “It isn’t that you must choose between one city and the wide world; nor between the desk or the saddle, a tent of skins or a compartment of brick. You can ride a camel in London or pack a folding-bed over the peaks to Llassa; you can be a tramp at home or an editor afield. It isn’t the world or not, Routledge, but--a woman or not!”