“In Rotterdam.  I don’t think he will be home this voyage.”

“And what’s happened to this house?  Where’s the old man?”

“You know all I know about it.  I haven’t been here for nearly a year.  We must expect progress to make things better than they were.  Where have you come from?”

“I’m running between Liverpool and Baltimore now, in the Planets.  They’re comfortable ships, but I don’t admire the Western ocean.  It’s too savage and cold.  How is Macandrew?  I came up from Liverpool because I felt I must see him again.  I heard he was here.”

From the way he talked, I thought he preferred those subjects requiring the least effort for a casual occasion.  “Now and then,” I had to tell him, “some of us have wondered what happened to the Cygnet.”

Hanson’s smile became effulgent.  My remark might have reminded him of a most enjoyable joke, but he made no sign, while enjoying it privately, that he intended to share it with me at any time.

“There was a Cygnet, wasn’t there?” he asked, when my patience had nearly gone.  “I should like somebody to confirm it.  The reason I came to this house tonight, to be candid, was just to see this room again, to settle a doubt I had.  Didn’t Macandrew stand over there, and show concern because a fair, plump woman wasn’t quick enough with his beer?”

I admitted this, as an encouragement.  “But when I got here tonight,” continued Hanson, “the change made me feel my mind had lost hold.  I must say it’s a relief to see you.”

“Has this anything to do with the Cygnet?” I asked.

“Everything.  I had the time of my life.  I wouldn’t have missed it for anything.  But somehow, now and then, I want to be quite sure I had it myself, and not some other fellow.”  He beamed with the very remembrance of the experience, and nodded his head at me.  He leaned over the table to me in confidence.  “Have you ever been to the tropics?  I don’t mean calling at Colombo or Rio.  I mean the back of things where there’s a remarkable sun experimenting with low life and hardly anybody looking on.  If ever you get the chance, you take it.  It alters all your ideas of time and space.  You begin to learn what stuff life is made of when you see a tropical forest, and see nothing else for months.  On the other hand,” he said, “you become nothing.  You see it doesn’t matter to others what happens to you, and you don’t care much what happens to others.”

“You don’t care?  It doesn’t matter?” I said in doubt to this young mathematician and philosopher, who had been experimenting with life.  “Isn’t that merely romantic?”

“Romance—­romance be damned!  I got down to the facts.”

“Well, get me down to them.  I should like the facts.  I want to hear what this strange voyage was like.”