Ay, Noll; thou art not the only numbskull--the very nations share thy cap and bells. Man is indeed incomplete without the woman. Any scheme of life that eliminates the woman is a futile scheme of life. The human animal is not one, but two--man without woman is wholly incomplete, a crudity, inadequate, a fatuity, and hence a thing of shame. Nay, the lad had glimmerings into depths deeper than that; gazing at the naked truth of things, it came to him that any scheme of life wherein the woman is made inferior degrades the man with her degradation, since she is a part of him--and a part of a man in a state of humiliation humiliates the whole of him. He wondered what she was doing; whether they were being kind to the sensitive, large-hearted, dainty Betty. A sob caught at his throat. He knew--with a hot flush he knew--it was the first generous thought that had moved him these many days. He had been pitying himself like a whipped cur, the which never yet brought a man honour or comfort or dignity. Wo-hee-ho-ho! moaned the scoffing wind without. What was she doing--out there--in the dark? Ah, Noll--what, indeed? The very shadows bent to hear. But, Ho-ho-hey! scoffed the mocking wind. CHAPTER LXXIII _Wherein our Hero dabbles his Hands in the Turgid Waters of Philosophy, and brings up Some Grains of Truth from a Pebbly Bottom. A Chapter that the Frivolous would do well to skip--the Ironies being infrequent, if not wholly wanting; and the Humours lacking in the Comic Interest_ For days Noll fretted restlessly about his room and the streets of the city. He went back to his old haunts--to the practice of his assiduous idlenesses. But the fever had gone out of his pleasant habits; and the talk of his fellows was become stale. He lingered on--lonesomely but doggedly. So the days passed into weeks; the weeks stole away the months. Noll could not shake off a strange sense of humiliation. Shrug his shoulders as he might at the pathetic silence that had taken the place of Betty’s mellow voice, humiliation nudged elbows with him, peered into his frowning eyes, was not to be rebuffed by his sullen face. He was a prey to self-contempt. The devil of regret takes hard snubbing. And no man lies intelligently to his own conscience. He took refuge in letters. This galling humiliation had set him soul-searching.... Rudderless, aimless, floating on the sea of pleasant tides, he now gazed in tribulation at gulfs that yawned before him and about him and beyond--the Whence and the Why and the Whither of this Present Seeming. And as the learning of old spent itself in the search for the Philosopher’s Stone, so the virile imagination of youth, steeping itself in written wisdom, went a-questing for the secret of life.