leaned against the rail in the lee of the wheel-house, and stared up at
the lofty spars and myriad ropes that I could guess were there. No, I
decided I was not keen on the voyage. The whole atmosphere of it was
wrong. There were the cold hours I had waited on the pier-ends. There
was Miss West coming along. There was the crew of broken men and
lunatics. I wondered if the wounded Greek in the 'midship house still
gibbered, and if Mr. Pike had yet sewed him up; and I was quite sure I
would not care to witness such a transaction in surgery.

Even Wada, who had never been in a sailing-ship, had his doubts of the
voyage. So had the steward, who had spent most of a life-time in sailing-
ships. So far as Captain West was concerned, crews did not exist. And
as for Miss West, she was so abominably robust that she could not be
anything else than an optimist in such matters. She had always lived;
her red blood sang to her only that she would always live and that
nothing evil would ever happen to her glorious personality.

Oh, trust me, I knew the way of red blood. Such was my condition that
the red-blood health of Miss West was virtually an affront to me--for I
knew how unthinking and immoderate such blood could be. And for five
months at least--there was Mr. Pike's offered wager of a pound of tobacco
or a month's wages to that effect--I was to be pent on the same ship with
her. As sure as cosmic sap was cosmic sap, just that sure was I that ere
the voyage was over I should be pestered by her making love to me. Please
do not mistake me. My certainty in this matter was due, not to any
exalted sense of my own desirableness to women, but to my anything but
exalted concept of women as instinctive huntresses of men. In my
experience women hunted men with quite the same blind tropism that marks
the pursuit of the sun by the sunflower, the pursuit of attachable
surfaces by the tendrils of the grapevine.

Call me blase--I do not mind, if by blase is meant the world-weariness,
intellectual, artistic, sensational, which can come to a young man of
thirty. For I was thirty, and I was weary of all these things--weary and
in doubt. It was because of this state that I was undertaking the
voyage. I wanted to get away by myself, to get away from all these
things, and, with proper perspective, mull the matter over.

It sometimes seemed to me that the culmination of this world-sickness had
been brought about by the success of m