ke? was his thought. And yet, it was not
so much the man nor the drink as was it what was associated with the
drink--the bright lights, the mirrors and dazzling array of glasses, the
warm and glowing faces and the resonant hum of the voices of men. That
was it, it was the voices of men, optimistic men, men who breathed
success and spent their money for drinks like men. He was lonely, that
was what was the matter with him; that was why he had snapped at the
invitation as a bonita strikes at a white rag on a hook. Not since with
Joe, at Shelly Hot Springs, with the one exception of the wine he took
with the Portuguese grocer, had Martin had a drink at a public bar.
Mental exhaustion did not produce a craving for liquor such as physical
exhaustion did, and he had felt no need for it. But just now he felt
desire for the drink, or, rather, for the atmosphere wherein drinks were
dispensed and disposed of. Such a place was the Grotto, where Brissenden
and he lounged in capacious leather chairs and drank Scotch and soda.

They talked. They talked about many things, and now Brissenden and now
Martin took turn in ordering Scotch and soda. Martin, who was extremely
strong-headed, marvelled at the other's capacity for liquor, and ever and
anon broke off to marvel at the other's conversation. He was not long in
assuming that Brissenden knew everything, and in deciding that here was
the second intellectual man he had met. But he noted that Brissenden had
what Professor Caldwell lacked--namely, fire, the flashing insight and
perception, the flaming uncontrol of genius. Living language flowed from
him. His thin lips, like the dies of a machine, stamped out phrases that
cut and stung; or again, pursing caressingly about the inchoate sound
they articulated, the thin lips shaped soft and velvety things, mellow
phrases of glow and glory, of haunting beauty, reverberant of the mystery
and inscrutableness of life; and yet again the thin lips were like a
bugle, from which rang the crash and tumult of cosmic strife, phrases
that sounded clear as silver, that were luminous as starry spaces, that
epitomized the final word of science and yet said something more--the
poet's word, the transcendental truth, elusive and without words which
could express, and which none the less found expression in the subtle and
all but ungraspable connotations of common words. He, by some wonder of
vision, saw beyond the farthest outpost of empiricism, wh