fe was become an abnormality--a disease of which he
sickened, as you all must when the last of the fever of aggression has
been diluted out of your veins. You die of your triumph, as the bee dies
of his own weapon of offence; and you can find no antidote to the poison
in the nature you have inoculated with your own virus.

"This man contemplated self-destruction as the only escape. He had sought
distraction of his moral torments in travel long and varied. Many of the
most beautiful, of the historically interesting places of the world, he
had visited and sojourned in--without avail. His haunting feeling, he
said, was that he did not belong to himself. Pursued by this Nemesis, he
came home to end it all. He still proclaimed his spiritual independence;
but it was immeshed, and he must tear the strands. This was wonderfully
perplexing to me, and, out of my curiosity, I must persuade him to make
one more attempt. His late efforts, I assured him, were nothing but an
endeavour to cure nausea with sweet syrups. He would not get his change
out of nature by such pitiful wooing. Let him, rather, emulate, if he
could not feel, the spirit of his remote forbears, and rally his nerves
to an expedition into the harsh and awful places of the earth. I would
accompany him, and watch with and for him, and supply that of the fibre
he lacked.

"He consented, and, after some difficulty (for there is an economy of
room in whalers), we obtained passage in a vessel and sailed into the
unknown. Our life and our food were simple and rugged; but the keen air,
the relief from luxury, the novelty and the wonder, wrought upon my
companion and renewed him, so that presently I was amused to note in him
signs of a moral preening--some smug resumption of that arrogant air of
superiority that is a tradition with your race."

Miss Groom here puckered her lips, and breathed a little destructive
laugh upon her cigarette ash.

"It did not last long," she said. "We encountered very bad weather, and
his nerves again went by the board. That was in the 60th longitude, I
think (where whales were still to be found in those years), and seven
hundred miles or so to the east of Spitzbergen. On the day--it was in
August--that the storm first overtook us, the boats were out in pursuit
of a 'right' whale, as, I believe, the men called it--a great bull
creature, and piebald like a horse; and I saw the spouting of his breath
as if a water main had burst in a London fog.