believe. I could not be so fortunate. It was too good, too good to be true. Symons’s lines came into my head:
A world of women, seeking you.”
And then I had ceased seeking. It was not for me, this greatest thing in the world, I had decided. Furuseth was right; I was abnormal, an “emotionless monster,” a strange bookish creature, capable of pleasuring in sensations only of the mind. And though I had been surrounded by women all my days, my appreciation of them had been aesthetic and nothing more. I had actually, at times, considered myself outside the pale, a monkish fellow denied the eternal or the passing passions I saw and understood so well in others. And now it had come! Undreamed of and unheralded, it had come. In what could have been no less than an ecstasy, I left my post at the head of the companion-way and started along the deck, murmuring to myself those beautiful lines of Mrs. Browning:
Instead of men and women years ago,
And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know
A sweeter music than they played to me.”
But the sweeter music was playing in my ears, and I was blind and oblivious to all about me. The sharp voice of Wolf Larsen aroused me.
“What the hell are you up to?” he was demanding.
I had strayed forward where the sailors were painting, and I came to myself to find my advancing foot on the verge of overturning a paint-pot.
“Sleep-walking, sunstroke, - what?” he barked.
“No; indigestion,” I retorted, and continued my walk as if nothing untoward had occurred.