“Because—­” Brissenden sipped his toddy and smiled appreciation of it.  “Because of the women.  They will worry you until you die, as they have already worried you, or else I was born yesterday.  Now there’s no use in your choking me; I’m going to have my say.  This is undoubtedly your calf love; but for Beauty’s sake show better taste next time.  What under heaven do you want with a daughter of the bourgeoisie?  Leave them alone.  Pick out some great, wanton flame of a woman, who laughs at life and jeers at death and loves one while she may.  There are such women, and they will love you just as readily as any pusillanimous product of bourgeois sheltered life.”

“Pusillanimous?” Martin protested.

“Just so, pusillanimous; prattling out little moralities that have been prattled into them, and afraid to live life.  They will love you, Martin, but they will love their little moralities more.  What you want is the magnificent abandon of life, the great free souls, the blazing butterflies and not the little gray moths.  Oh, you will grow tired of them, too, of all the female things, if you are unlucky enough to live.  But you won’t live.  You won’t go back to your ships and sea; therefore, you’ll hang around these pest-holes of cities until your bones are rotten, and then you’ll die.”

“You can lecture me, but you can’t make me talk back,” Martin said.  “After all, you have but the wisdom of your temperament, and the wisdom of my temperament is just as unimpeachable as yours.”

They disagreed about love, and the magazines, and many things, but they liked each other, and on Martin’s part it was no less than a profound liking.  Day after day they were together, if for no more than the hour Brissenden spent in Martin’s stuffy room.  Brissenden never arrived without his quart of whiskey, and when they dined together down-town, he drank Scotch and soda throughout the meal.  He invariably paid the way for both, and it was through him that Martin learned the refinements of food, drank his first champagne, and made acquaintance with Rhenish wines.

But Brissenden was always an enigma.  With the face of an ascetic, he was, in all the failing blood of him, a frank voluptuary.  He was unafraid to die, bitter and cynical of all the ways of living; and yet, dying, he loved life, to the last atom of it.  He was possessed by a madness to live, to thrill, “to squirm my little space in the cosmic dust whence I came,” as he phrased it once himself.  He had tampered with drugs and done many strange things in quest of new thrills, new sensations.  As he told Martin, he had once gone three days without water, had done so voluntarily, in order to experience the exquisite delight of such a thirst assuaged.  Who or what he was, Martin never learned.  He was a man without a past, whose future was the imminent grave and whose present was a bitter fever of living.

CHAPTER XXXIII