desires is his soul. Therein
you are both wrong. You lay the stress upon the desire apart from the
soul, Miss Brewster lays the stress on the soul apart from the desire,
and in point of fact soul and desire are the same thing.

"However," I continued, "Miss Brewster is right in contending that
temptation is temptation whether the man yield or overcome. Fire is
fanned by the wind until it leaps up fiercely. So is desire like fire.
It is fanned, as by a wind, by sight of the thing desired, or by a new
and luring description or comprehension of the thing desired. There lies
the temptation. It is the wind that fans the desire until it leaps up to
mastery. That's temptation. It may not fan sufficiently to make the
desire overmastering, but in so far as it fans at all, that far is it
temptation. And, as you say, it may tempt for good as well as for evil."

I felt proud of myself as we sat down to the table. My words had been
decisive. At least they had put an end to the discussion.

But Wolf Larsen seemed voluble, prone to speech as I had never seen him
before. It was as though he were bursting with pent energy which must
find an outlet somehow. Almost immediately he launched into a discussion
on love. As usual, his was the sheer materialistic side, and Maud's was
the idealistic. For myself, beyond a word or so of suggestion or
correction now and again, I took no part.

He was brilliant, but so was Maud, and for some time I lost the thread of
the conversation through studying her face as she talked. It was a face
that rarely displayed colour, but to-night it was flushed and vivacious.
Her wit was playing keenly, and she was enjoying the tilt as much as Wolf
Larsen, and he was enjoying it hugely. For some reason, though I know
not why in the argument, so utterly had I lost it in the contemplation of
one stray brown lock of Maud's hair, he quoted from Iseult at Tintagel,
where she says:

"Blessed am I beyond women even herein,
That beyond all born women is my sin,
And perfect my transgression."

As he had read pessimism into Omar, so now he read triumph, stinging
triumph and exultation, into Swinburne's lines. And he read rightly, and
he read well. He had hardly ceased reading when Louis put his head into
the companion-way and whispered down:

"Be easy, will ye? The fog's lifted, an' 'tis the port light iv a
steamer that's crossin' our bow this blessed minute."

Wolf Larsen sprang on deck,