He was almost humming the words, and it dawned upon him that the other reminded him of the trade wind, of the Northeast Trade, steady, and cool, and strong.  He was equable, he was to be relied upon, and withal there was a certain bafflement about him.  Martin had the feeling that he never spoke his full mind, just as he had often had the feeling that the trades never blew their strongest but always held reserves of strength that were never used.  Martin’s trick of visioning was active as ever.  His brain was a most accessible storehouse of remembered fact and fancy, and its contents seemed ever ordered and spread for his inspection.  Whatever occurred in the instant present, Martin’s mind immediately presented associated antithesis or similitude which ordinarily expressed themselves to him in vision.  It was sheerly automatic, and his visioning was an unfailing accompaniment to the living present.  Just as Ruth’s face, in a momentary jealousy had called before his eyes a forgotten moonlight gale, and as Professor Caldwell made him see again the Northeast Trade herding the white billows across the purple sea, so, from moment to moment, not disconcerting but rather identifying and classifying, new memory-visions rose before him, or spread under his eyelids, or were thrown upon the screen of his consciousness.  These visions came out of the actions and sensations of the past, out of things and events and books of yesterday and last week—­a countless host of apparitions that, waking or sleeping, forever thronged his mind.

So it was, as he listened to Professor Caldwell’s easy flow of speech—­the conversation of a clever, cultured man—­that Martin kept seeing himself down all his past.  He saw himself when he had been quite the hoodlum, wearing a “stiff-rim” Stetson hat and a square-cut, double-breasted coat, with a certain swagger to the shoulders and possessing the ideal of being as tough as the police permitted.  He did not disguise it to himself, nor attempt to palliate it.  At one time in his life he had been just a common hoodlum, the leader of a gang that worried the police and terrorized honest, working-class householders.  But his ideals had changed.  He glanced about him at the well-bred, well-dressed men and women, and breathed into his lungs the atmosphere of culture and refinement, and at the same moment the ghost of his early youth, in stiff-rim and square-cut, with swagger and toughness, stalked across the room.  This figure, of the corner hoodlum, he saw merge into himself, sitting and talking with an actual university professor.

For, after all, he had never found his permanent abiding place.  He had fitted in wherever he found himself, been a favorite always and everywhere by virtue of holding his own at work and at play and by his willingness and ability to fight for his rights and command respect.  But he had never taken root.  He had fitted in sufficiently to satisfy his fellows but not to satisfy himself.  He had been perturbed always by a feeling of unrest, had heard always the call of something from beyond, and had wandered on through life seeking it until he found books and art and love.  And here he was, in the midst of all this, the only one of all the comrades he had adventured with who could have made themselves eligible for the inside of the Morse home.