r breast, the infant lusty in the hollow of her arm. And yet, such is
our alchemy compounded of the ages, woman works magic in our dreams and
in our veins, so that more than dreams and far visions and the blood of
life itself is woman to us, who, as lovers truly say, is more than all
the world. Yet is this just, else would man not be man, the fighter and
the conqueror, treading his red way on the face of all other and lesser
life--for, had man not been the lover, the royal lover, he could never
have become the kingly fighter. We fight best, and die best, and live
best, for what we love.

I am that one man. I see myself the many selves that have gone into the
constituting of me. And ever I see the woman, the many women, who have
made me and undone me, who have loved me and whom I have loved.

I remember, oh, long ago when human kind was very young, that I made me a
snare and a pit with a pointed stake upthrust in the middle thereof, for
the taking of Sabre-Tooth. Sabre-Tooth, long-fanged and long-haired, was
the chiefest peril to us of the squatting place, who crouched through the
nights over our fires and by day increased the growing shell-bank beneath
us by the clams we dug and devoured from the salt mud-flats beside us.

And when the roar and the squall of Sabre-Tooth roused us where we
squatted by our dying embers, and I was wild with far vision of the proof
of the pit and the stake, it was the woman, arms about me, leg-twining,
who fought with me and restrained me not to go out through the dark to my
desire. She was part-clad, for warmth only, in skins of animals, mangy
and fire-burnt, that I had slain; she was swart and dirty with camp
smoke, unwashed since the spring rains, with nails gnarled and broken,
and hands that were calloused like footpads and were more like claws than
like hands; but her eyes were blue as the summer sky is, as the deep sea
is, and there was that in her eyes, and in her clasped arms about me, and
in her heart beating against mine, that withheld me . . . though through
the dark until dawn, while Sabre-Tooth squalled his wrath and his agony,
I could hear my comrades snickering and sniggling to their women in that
I had not the faith in my emprise and invention to venture through the
night to the pit and the stake I had devised for the undoing of Sabre-
Tooth. But my woman, my savage mate held me, savage that I was, and her
eyes drew me, and her arms chained me, and her twining legs a