The other man laughed with amusement, throwing his head back and showing his teeth. “I won’t ask you what _your_ intentions are,” he said, with delicate irony in his tone. “You know, I am a tremendously busy man. I earn five hundred a year by hard work; but it’s no good. If you have acquired a liking for intensity in life, you can’t do without it. I mean vivid soul experience. It takes the place, with us, of the old adventure, and physical excitement.” Siegmund looked at the other man with baffled, anxious eyes. “Well, and what then?” he said. “What then? A craving for intense life is nearly as deadly as any other craving. You become a _concentré_, you feed your normal flame with oxygen, and it devours your tissue. The soulful ladies of romance are always semi-transparent.” Siegmund laughed. “At least, I am quite opaque,” he said. The other glanced over his easy, mature figure and strong throat. “Not altogether,” said Hampson. “And you, I should think, are one whose flame goes nearly out, when the stimulant is lacking.” Siegmund glanced again at him, startled. “You haven’t much reserve. You’re like a tree that’ll flower till it kills itself,” the man continued. “You’ll run till you drop, and then you won’t get up again. You’ve no dispassionate intellect to control you and economize.” “You’re telling me very plainly what I am and am not,” said Siegmund, laughing rather sarcastically. He did not like it. “Oh, it’s only what I think,” replied Hampson. “We’re a good deal alike, you see, and have gone the same way. You married and I didn’t; but women have always done as they liked with me.” “That’s hardly so in my case,” said Siegmund. Hampson eyed him critically. “Say one woman; it’s enough,” he replied. Siegmund gazed, musing, over the sea. “The best sort of women—the most interesting—are the worst for us,” Hampson resumed. “By instinct they aim at suppressing the gross and animal in us. Then they are supersensitive—refined a bit beyond humanity. We, who are as little gross as need be, become their instruments. Life is grounded in them, like electricity in the earth; and we take from them their unrealized life, turn it into light or warmth or power for them. The ordinary woman is, alone, a great potential force, an accumulator, if you like, charged from the source of life. In us her force becomes evident. “She can’t live without us, but she destroys us. These deep, interesting women don’t want _us_; they want the flowers of the spirit they can gather of us. We, as natural men, are more or less degrading to them and to their love of us; therefore they destroy the natural man in us—that is, us altogether.” “You’re a bit downright are you not?” asked Siegmund, deprecatingly. He did not disagree with what his friend said, nor tell him such statements were arbitrary.