or espoused a doctrine, or done anything invoking
the deep chords, knows that this is not so. There is the reaction. When
I got aboard the _Manola_ once more and stood in the middle of my stuffy
little cabin on the port side of the engine hatch, I was a cold and
discouraged pessimist. The oil lamp on my table showed me my domain. A
cockroach was making its way methodically round and round a covered
plate of sandwiches, while its brother or possibly a distant relation
was enjoying a good tuck-in of the cocoa at the bottom of a cup. Down
below I heard the bang of a bucket, and I reflected that the donkeyman,
after cleaning his fires and sweeping his tubes, was washing himself in
the stoke-hold. The night watchman in the galley was drying heavy
flannels over the stove and the warm, offensive odour hung in the air.
On the big mirror which I have mentioned, I saw a memorandum written
with a piece of soap: 'Steering Gear.' I recalled that I must get the
Mate to take up the slack in his tiller-head in the morning. I was
overwhelmed with the hard, gritty facts of existence, an existence the
most discouraging and drab on earth I imagine, unless one has some fine
romantic ideal before one. And I stood there, irresolute, looking at my
figure in the glass, which reminded me of a badly painted ancestral
portrait, and wondered whether I was capable of a fine romantic ideal.
There lies the trouble with most of us, I fancy. We lose our youth and
we fail to lay hold of the resolution of manhood. And before we know it
we have drifted moodily into forlorn by-ways of sensuality....

"Because I knew that if I went to see that girl next day I could no
longer maintain a detached air of being a kind of benevolent and
irresponsible guardian. All the unusual and melodramatic happenings of
the evening were unable to blind me to the basic fact that our relations
had changed, and I dared not follow them, even in thought, to their
logical consequences. And yet I dared not retreat. I had that much
imaginative manhood! I could not face a future haunted by her questing,
derisive, contemptuous smile. As I lay down and watched the lamp giving
out its last spasmodic flickers before it left me in darkness, I
thought I saw her, say a year hence, in a vague yet dreadful
environment, halting her racing thoughts to remember for a moment the
man who had failed her in a time of need. I saw the shrug and the sudden
turn of the shoulders, the curl of the lip, the