"Oh, Muttonhead!--a manner of speaking." "A goaty eye for Jenks' fair daughter belike?" "No. Merely polite to her, like any gentleman." "An old man then." "Forty perhaps." "Ah, Ben, these ancient cods! They're the worst, didn't you know? Consider our Pontifex, how we sometimes hear him moaning in the night. I tell you, he hath a private succubus. Down the chimney cometh she, most punctually, Wednesdays and Saturdays, to grind him all night long between hot ivory legs, grind him even unto the very last gerunds and aorists and ablatives and first person plural of the verb _contorquere_." "Ha?" "Alas, poor Ben!--no Latin? It means to wriggle." "Well, shame on you!" "Button your long lip. You can't say that when I've made you laugh." "No, blast you, I can't. As for Shawn, I think he only wished to know more about _Artemis_." "Ay-yah. Still everyone wants for something." "Granted, O Grandfather! And thou?" "Trifles. Most of the ocean and the empire of Cathay. The spring moon. The Northwest Passage, the Fountain of Youth, a few acres of Eden. Trifles, but still you see it's true--everyone wants for something, even I." _Chapter Two_ "Yet the manifold desires of man," said Mr. Gideon Hibbs, biting a walnut--"and note that within this category I would subsume the concupiscent;"--his long right hand held down a finger of the left--"the natural, wherein I include the need of daily provender and nature's other common demands;"--another finger--"the intellectual, that is the desires of mind operating as it were in _vacuo_; the spiritual, whereby I understand the desire of man unto God;"--his left thumb waved, not included, and this troubled Mr. Hibbs because he was slightly drunk--"all these desires, I say, are subject to the ineluctable domination of _chance_, gentlemen, pure chance." He sighed at another walnut, a grayish man not old, in fact rather young by arithmetical measure. He could never have been young in spirit; Reuben supposed that Mr. Hibbs would have admitted this himself, with stern pride, holding that flesh is corruption, that truth can be illuminated only by the cold flame of philosophy. From threadbare sleeves jutted his hands, pale and bony, clumsy with anything but a goose quill, stained by ink and tobacco, the nails always black--a corruption of the flesh that did not trouble him.