“It is not in what you succeed in doing that you get your joy, but in the doing of it.  You can’t tell me.  I know it.  You know it.  Beauty hurts you.  It is an everlasting pain in you, a wound that does not heal, a knife of flame.  Why should you palter with magazines?  Let beauty be your end.  Why should you mint beauty into gold?  Anyway, you can’t; so there’s no use in my getting excited over it.  You can read the magazines for a thousand years and you won’t find the value of one line of Keats.  Leave fame and coin alone, sign away on a ship to-morrow, and go back to your sea.”

“Not for fame, but for love,” Martin laughed.  “Love seems to have no place in your Cosmos; in mine, Beauty is the handmaiden of Love.”

Brissenden looked at him pityingly and admiringly.  “You are so young, Martin boy, so young.  You will flutter high, but your wings are of the finest gauze, dusted with the fairest pigments.  Do not scorch them.  But of course you have scorched them already.  It required some glorified petticoat to account for that ‘Love-cycle,’ and that’s the shame of it.”

“It glorifies love as well as the petticoat,” Martin laughed.

“The philosophy of madness,” was the retort.  “So have I assured myself when wandering in hasheesh dreams.  But beware.  These bourgeois cities will kill you.  Look at that den of traitors where I met you.  Dry rot is no name for it.  One can’t keep his sanity in such an atmosphere.  It’s degrading.  There’s not one of them who is not degrading, man and woman, all of them animated stomachs guided by the high intellectual and artistic impulses of clams—­”

He broke off suddenly and regarded Martin.  Then, with a flash of divination, he saw the situation.  The expression on his face turned to wondering horror.

“And you wrote that tremendous ‘Love-cycle’ to her—­that pale, shrivelled, female thing!”

The next instant Martin’s right hand had shot to a throttling clutch on his throat, and he was being shaken till his teeth rattled.  But Martin, looking into his eyes, saw no fear there,—­naught but a curious and mocking devil.  Martin remembered himself, and flung Brissenden, by the neck, sidelong upon the bed, at the same moment releasing his hold.

Brissenden panted and gasped painfully for a moment, then began to chuckle.

“You had made me eternally your debtor had you shaken out the flame,” he said.

“My nerves are on a hair-trigger these days,” Martin apologized.  “Hope I didn’t hurt you.  Here, let me mix a fresh toddy.”

“Ah, you young Greek!” Brissenden went on.  “I wonder if you take just pride in that body of yours.  You are devilish strong.  You are a young panther, a lion cub.  Well, well, it is you who must pay for that strength.”

“What do you mean?” Martin asked curiously, passing aim a glass.  “Here, down this and be good.”