A woman! Woman! Heaven knows I had been sufficiently tormented by their persecutions to know them. I leave it to you: thirty years of age, not entirely unhandsome, an intellectual and artistic place in the world, and an income most dazzling—why shouldn’t women pursue me? They would have pursued me had I been a hunchback, for the sake of my artistic place alone, for the sake of my income alone. Yes; and love! Did I not know love—lyric, passionate, mad, romantic love? That, too, was of old time with me. I, too, had throbbed and sung and sobbed and sighed—yes, and known grief, and buried my dead. But it was so long ago. How young I was—turned twenty-four! And after that I had learned the bitter lesson that even deathless grief may die; and I had laughed again and done my share of philandering with the pretty, ferocious moths that fluttered around the light of my fortune and artistry; and after that, in turn, I had retired disgusted from the lists of woman, and gone on long lance-breaking adventures in the realm of mind. And here I was, on board the _Elsinore_, unhorsed by my encounters with the problems of the ultimate, carried off the field with a broken pate. As I leaned against the rail, dismissing premonitions of disaster, I could not help thinking of Miss West below, bustling and humming as she made her little nest. And from her my thought drifted on to the everlasting mystery of woman. Yes, I, with all the futuristic contempt for woman, am ever caught up afresh by the mystery of woman. Oh, no illusions, thank you. Woman, the love-seeker, obsessing and possessing, fragile and fierce, soft and venomous, prouder than Lucifer and as prideless, holds a perpetual, almost morbid, attraction for the thinker. What is this flame of her, blazing through all her contradictions and ignobilities?—this ruthless passion for life, always for life, more life on the planet? At times it seems to me brazen, and awful, and soulless. At times I am made petulant by it. And at other times I am swayed by the sublimity of it. No; there is no escape from woman. Always, as a savage returns to a dark glen where goblins are and gods may be, so do I return to the contemplation of woman. Mr. Pike’s voice interrupted my musings. From for’ard, on the main deck, I heard him snarl: “On the main-topsail-yard, there!—if you cut that gasket I’ll split your damned skull!” Again he called, with a marked change of voice, and the Henry he called to I concluded was the training-ship boy. “You, Henry, main-skysail-yard, there!” he cried. “Don’t make those gaskets up! Fetch ’em in along the yard and make fast to the tye!” Thus routed from my reverie, I decided to go below to bed. As my hand went out to the knob of the chart-house door again the mate’s voice rang out: “Come on, you gentlemen’s sons in disguise! Wake up! Lively now!” CHAPTER IX.