on and make ends meet somehow,
if he did that. She could help him. He said she had some good ideas,
only they wanted working out. And here was a secret--he'd written a
play! Mabel leaned over the candy jars and whispered this dreadful
thing in the author's ear. A friend of theirs had seen it--he was at
one of the theatres in the electrical department and knew all the
stars--and he said it was very good but needed what he called pulling
together! If only a reliable person in the play-writing line could be
found to do this pulling together, there might be a fortune in it.

The reader may be disturbed at Mabel's insistence upon the financial
possibilities of literature, but in this she was only a child of her
time. The point worthy of note is not her rapacity but the dexterity
with which she utilized literature to further her ambition. She was
identifying herself with literature and so fortifying her position.
She was really far better fitted to be the wife of a fictionist than
Imogene. And she could appreciate poetry addressed to herself. The
author eventually saw some of it for a moment, written on sermon
paper, but the stanzas shall remain forever vibrating in his own
bosom. She is memorable to the author, moreover, in that she brought
home to him for the first time the startling fact that every such
woman is, in a sense, an adventuress. She never knows what will happen
next. She is in the grip of incalculable forces. She has to work with
feverish haste to make herself secure and to use even such bizarre
instruments as literature in the pursuit of safety. Back in his tiny
chambers over the old Gate of Cliffords Inn, the author meditated
darkly upon that play that only required "pulling together" to make
it the nucleus of a fortune. Evidently, he reflected, there were
determined characters about, aided and inspired by equally determined
young women, battering upon the gates of Fame, and he felt his own
chances of success against such rivals were frail indeed. So he went
to sea again.

Here, in one short sentence, is the gist of this book, that the sea is
a way of escape from the intolerable burden of life. A cynic once
described it as having all the advantages of suicide without any of
its inconveniences. To the author it was more than that. It was the
means of finding himself in the world, a medium in which he could work
out the dreams which beset him and which were the basis of future
writings. But ever at the back o