of men, optimistic men, men who breathed success and spent their money for drinks like men.  He was lonely, that was what was the matter with him; that was why he had snapped at the invitation as a bonita strikes at a white rag on a hook.  Not since with Joe, at Shelly Hot Springs, with the one exception of the wine he took with the Portuguese grocer, had Martin had a drink at a public bar.  Mental exhaustion did not produce a craving for liquor such as physical exhaustion did, and he had felt no need for it.  But just now he felt desire for the drink, or, rather, for the atmosphere wherein drinks were dispensed and disposed of.  Such a place was the Grotto, where Brissenden and he lounged in capacious leather chairs and drank Scotch and soda.

They talked.  They talked about many things, and now Brissenden and now Martin took turn in ordering Scotch and soda.  Martin, who was extremely strong-headed, marvelled at the other’s capacity for liquor, and ever and anon broke off to marvel at the other’s conversation.  He was not long in assuming that Brissenden knew everything, and in deciding that here was the second intellectual man he had met.  But he noted that Brissenden had what Professor Caldwell lacked—­namely, fire, the flashing insight and perception, the flaming uncontrol of genius.  Living language flowed from him.  His thin lips, like the dies of a machine, stamped out phrases that cut and stung; or again, pursing caressingly about the inchoate sound they articulated, the thin lips shaped soft and velvety things, mellow phrases of glow and glory, of haunting beauty, reverberant of the mystery and inscrutableness of life; and yet again the thin lips were like a bugle, from which rang the crash and tumult of cosmic strife, phrases that sounded clear as silver, that were luminous as starry spaces, that epitomized the final word of science and yet said something more—­the poet’s word, the transcendental truth, elusive and without words which could express, and which none the less found expression in the subtle and all but ungraspable connotations of common words.  He, by some wonder of vision, saw beyond the farthest outpost of empiricism, where was no language for narration, and yet, by some golden miracle of speech, investing known words with unknown significances, he conveyed to Martin’s consciousness messages that were incommunicable to ordinary souls.

Martin forgot his first impression of dislike.  Here was the best the books had to offer coming true.  Here was an intelligence, a living man for him to look up to.  “I am down in the dirt at your feet,” Martin repeated to himself again and again.

“You’ve studied biology,” he said aloud, in significant allusion.

To his surprise Brissenden shook his head.

“But you are stating truths that are substantiated only by biology,” Martin insisted, and was rewarded by a blank stare.  “Your conclusions are in line with the books which you must have read.”