lenty of time for profound meditation--upon the
riddle of life.

In fact, they seemed to be placed there merely for the purpose of
reflecting. Those men and women wringing their hands or spreading their
fingers, or walking on their hands, or even standing on the tip of a
single finger, while grazing the ceiling with their feet, were all
thinking. Professor Toussaint alone, who came floating toward Frederick
in the gangway, seemed to be acting differently. With his right hand
raised, he seemed to be saying: "An artist may not rust. He must air
himself. He must seek new conditions of life. If he doesn't receive the
honour he should in Italy, he should simply go to France, like Leonardo
da Vinci, or even emigrate to the land of liberty."

"I want to live, live, nothing else," thought Frederick. "In the future,
like Cato the Elder, I would rather walk a year on foot along a way that
I could cover in three days on a steamer."

To avoid the hideous companionship of the blue, swollen thinkers, he left
the gloomy, funereal smoking-room, and, with aching head and leaden
limbs, dragged himself on deck, where the wild scurrying of the storm
and the chaos of snow, rain and salty clouds of foam tore the weight away
from his soul.

XXXVIII

In the space at the head of the companionway Frederick came upon the
same company as the day before, sitting close together in steamer
chairs--Toussaint, the timid skipper of the sailing vessel, the woman
artist, the woman physician, the tall electrical engineer, and a man who
had not been there the day before, an American colonel. He was a handsome
specimen of the highest type of his widely spread species. He was engaged
in a conversation on the number of miles covered by all the railroads in
the United States, and his statements concerning their extent set fire to
the European chauvinism of the electrical engineer. They forgot the
weather in their debate. Each party to the dispute named an incredible
number of miles and vaunted the advantages of the railroads in his native
country.

"We are running at only half speed," said Toussaint to Frederick. "Isn't
it strange how suddenly the weather changed?"

"Very," answered Frederick.

"Of course," Toussaint continued with a pale grimace intended for a
smile, "I don't understand anything about cyclones, but the seamen say
this storm is cyclonic."

"It may be called a cyclone," said the timid little skipper of the
sailing vessel. "If