"And you call yourself a scientist," I marveled, leaning back in the chair. "Things like this happen—yes. But in the serious business of life you’re ground between the millstones of the gods—a victim of events you cannot control. Look at Rabelais and Montaigne, two free spirits if ever there were any. Yet one was a victim of priestcraft so that he cried out until he roared with orgiastic laughter, and the other a victim of property,—took a wife that disgusted him. (I have beautiful editions of both of them, by the way, which you ought to look at.) But each of them was a victim." "A victim if you’re victimized." Dibdin puffed at his foul pipe. (I cannot make him smoke a decent cigarette.) "But if you know how to play with circumstances, you use them as I saw a cowboy in Arizona ride a bucking broncho. You ride them till you break them. Look at me, my boy," he went on, with a grin of mingled modesty and bravado. "I knew I was a tramp at heart. But my people would have been broken with humiliation if I had turned out a ’hobo’ on their hands. So I took to ruins and buried cities in out-of-the-way places, and politely speaking I’m an archeologist. But I tramp about the world to my heart’s content." That, I admit, presented Dibdin and the whole matter in a new light to me. "Why," I finally asked, "didn’t I do that?" "Because you’re not a tramp at heart," puffed Dibdin. "Yes, I am!" I almost shouted at him. "That is exactly what I must be, since I have such a horror of home, of domesticity." "You with all this comfort—a flat, a housekeeper, all the truck in this room? No, no, my boy! You’re cast for something else. Hanged if I know for what, though. These things are too deep to generalize about. Time will tell." I rose and circled the room, inanely surveying "this comfort" that seems to offend Dibdin, though he likes well enough to sprawl in my best arm-chair. The books, the rugs, the fire, the alluring chairs, the happy hours that I have spent here seemed to crowd about me like the ghosts of familiars, praying to be not driven from their haunts. "Then why the devil," I demanded accusingly, pausing before him, "did you encourage me and praise my little papers and bits of work in college when you were teaching me?" "Trying to teach you," he corrected placidly. "You’ve never been a teacher in a large fashionable college, my boy. When most of your so-called students are taking your course because it is reported to be a snap, so they can spend their evenings at billiards, musical comedies, or the like, any young devil with a ray of intellectual interest becomes the teacher’s golden-haired boy. Even teachers are human. You’ll admit you haven’t set even so much as your own ink-well on fire as yet." "All that is beside the point," I returned irritably. "Here I am in the devil of a fix and you are talking like Job’s comforters."