Perhaps I wanted her to realize that not every man would have responded so quickly to the call of impersonal romance. I can look back on all that egotism of youth and despise it; but there’s something not wholly ignoble in an egotism that wants only good fame with one’s self and one’s secret collaborator. Anyhow, there were moments when my dedication seemed solemn; just as there were other moments when I seemed like an inadequate tenor in a comic opera. I never knew just how she hovered between those two conceptions. We were destined to see each other only by lightning-flashes--never once in the clear light of day. “I can’t tell you how I came to hate the Portuguese before we left that mean little hole. You laughed at me once for rending Blakely to shreds over Camoëns. I’ve read Camoëns in my day and hated him, as if something in me had known beforehand that I was eventually to have good reason to loathe every syllable of that damned language. My stock is Southern, too--South Carolina--and you can imagine how I enjoyed seeing, at every turn, the nigger the better man. Portugal ought to be wiped off the map of Africa. “Well--I got our arrangements made as well as I could. It was lucky I had left handsome margins for everything, because the graft was sickening. They wouldn’t let your own approved consignments leave the dock without your handing out cash to at least three yellow dogs that called themselves officials. I had hoped to find some sort of female servant for her--I shook at the thought of having her go off on a trip like that without another woman to do things for her that I, in the circumstances, couldn’t very well do. But there wasn’t a wench of either color or any of the intervening shades that a nice woman could have had about her. She was very plucky about it all. As I say, she had made her great point, and didn’t care. The morning we started, she stuck a gentian in my buttonhole and another in hers--and she smiled. A smile of hers carried very far. And so we started. “I needn’t give you the details of our trip. People write books about that sort of thing; keep diaries of their mishaps, and how Umgalooloo or Ishbosheth or some other valuable assistant stole a bandanna handkerchief and had to be mulcted of a day’s pay--all very interesting to somebody, no doubt. To tell the truth, the concrete details maddened me; and we seemed to live wholly in concrete terms of the smallest. I, who had planned for my _wanderjahr_ a colossal, an almost forbidden intimacy with Platonic abstractions! I had always rather meant to go in for biology eventually, but I got over that in Africa; we were much too near the lower forms of life. And to this day, as you well know, I can’t bear hearing Harry Dawes talk about folk-lore. He’s driven me home from the club a good many nights.”