On the way up to the ranch from the railway station Mimika had been chattering hard to her brother; but he noticed certain changes in her appearance with a feeling akin to remorse. He was not at all sure that she was really happy, despite her apparent enthusiasm over what she called the generosity of Julius. He wished that his mother had delayed things till he had returned from Europe; and he could not help wondering how far his failure to send home more than two-thirds of his own scanty income as a newspaper correspondent had contributed to the haste of this marriage. He had not been able to learn much about it. His mother was a vague widow, who, like so many widows, regarded marriage with a kind of ghostly detachment and a more than maidenly innocence. She was devoted to Mimika, but quite ready, he feared, to sacrifice Mimika to himself. Roy himself had not had too easy a time in the last few years. He was one of those not uncommon Americans who combine an extraordinary knowledge of the world with the unworldliness and sometimes the gullibility of an Eastern sage. He knew more about the cathedrals of England than almost any Englishman; more about the châteaux of France than most Frenchmen. He could have dictated an encyclopedia of useful knowledge about Italy and Egypt. He had been a war correspondent in four quarters of the globe, and he had acquired a sense of the larger movements in politics that gave his opinions an unusual interest. He flew over the big guns of international affairs like a man in an air-plane; and, though his European hearers might not always like his signals, they usually felt that he was looking beyond their horizon. But his ambition was to do creative work, and he had not yet succeeded. He marveled how some other men, without expending a tithe of his energy, had produced a shelf of books while he was still taking his notes. He never seemed to have the time for creation, and whenever he approached any original work he gravitated toward the method of the newspaper correspondent. He wondered sometimes whether this was due to a lack of what he called the 'creative impulse.' One of the things to which he had been looking forward on this visit was the opportunity that it would give him of obtaining some first-hand material from a real live sea-captain. Yet he was not sure whether he would ever be able to transmute it into an original book. His boyish smile was in somewhat pathetic contrast with his gold-spectacled, and curiously dreamy, yet overstrained eyes, which sometimes gave his face in repose the expression of a youthful Buddha. His frequent abrupt changes between a violently active life and an almost completely sedentary one had not been good for him physically, and he was subject to fits of depression, relieved by fits of extreme optimism.