A poor devil of a man is most lucky when, loving, he is loved. Grievous indeed must be the fate of the lover who is unloved. And I, for one, and for still other reasons, congratulate myself upon the vastitude of my good fortune. For see, were Margaret any other sort of a woman, were she . . . well, just the lovely and lovable and adorably snuggly sort who seem made just precisely for love and loving and nestling into the strong arms of a man—why, there wouldn’t be anything remarkable or wonderful about her loving me. But Margaret is Margaret, strong, self-possessed, serene, controlled, a very mistress of herself. And there’s the miracle—that such a woman should have been awakened to love by me. It is almost unbelievable. I go out of my way to get another peep into those long, cool, gray eyes of hers and see them grow melting soft as she looks at me. She is no Juliet, thank the Lord; and thank the Lord I am no Romeo. And yet I go up alone on the freezing poop, and under my breath chant defiantly at the snorting gale, and at the graybeards thundering down on us, that I am a lover. And I send messages to the lonely albatrosses veering through the murk that I am a lover. And I look at the wretched sailors crawling along the spray-swept bridge and know that never in ten thousand wretched lives could they experience the love I experience, and I wonder why God ever made them. * * * * * “And the one thing I had firmly resolved from the start,” Margaret confessed to me this morning in the cabin, when I released her from my arms, “was that I would not permit you to make love to me.” “True daughter of Herodias,” I gaily gibed, “so such was the drift of your thoughts even as early as the very start. Already you were looking upon me with a considerative female eye.” She laughed proudly, and did not reply. “What possibly could have led you to expect that I would make love to you?” I insisted. “Because it is the way of young male passengers on long voyages,” she replied. “Then others have . . . ?” “They always do,” she assured me gravely. And at that instant I knew the first ridiculous pang of jealousy; but I laughed it away and retorted: “It was an ancient Chinese philosopher who is first recorded as having said, what doubtlessly the cave men before him gibbered, namely, that a woman pursues a man by fluttering away in advance of him.” “Wretch!” she cried. “I never fluttered. When did I ever flutter!” “It is a delicate subject . . . ” I began with assumed hesitancy. “When did I ever flutter?” she demanded. I availed myself of one of Schopenhauer’s ruses by making a shift. “From the first you observed nothing that a female could afford to miss observing,” I charged. “I’ll wager you knew as quickly as I the very instant when I first loved you.” “I knew the first time you hated me,” she evaded.