“I catch it.”

He nodded.  He understood perfectly.  Some analogous process was going on within him at that moment.  He, too, was discovering himself.

“Have you discovered yourself, Keith?”

“Yes, by other methods, elsewhere.  I am only here for a short time in the Spring and another ten days in September.  That is hardly enough, even supposing I were the sort of person to be accessible to these externals.  I have passed that stage.  I am too old, too unemotional.  I prefer devouring a partridge en casserole or listening to your conversation ("listening to my conversation!” thought Mr. Heard) to all the scenery in the world But I watch other people; I make it my business to study their condition; I put myself in their places.  JE CONSTATE, as the French say.  To them, the landscape of Nepenthe is alive, often malignantly alive.  They do what you cannot so effectually do in the North; they humanize it, identifying its various aspects with their own moods, its features with their own traditions.”

Mr. Heard thought of those tremendous mists he had seen only an hour ago—­the daughters of old Ocean.

“They humanize it,” he echoed.  “The mythopoetic faculty!”

“Perhaps this capacity of Southern scenery to bear a mortal interpretation accounts for the anthropomorphic deities of classical days.  I often think it does.  Even we moderns are unaccountably moved by its varying facets which act sometimes as an aphrodisiac, and sometimes by their very perfection, their discouraging spell, their insolent beauty, suggest the hopelessness of all human endeavour. . . .  Denis!  I should think him capable of anything, just now.  Do you imagine a person like this could possibly remain insensible to the beguiling influence of these surroundings?”

“I never thought about him.”

“Really?  You interest me, Heard.  If you deny the susceptibility of a temperament like his, you deny the whole operation of externals upon character and action.  You deny, for example, the success of the Roman Catholic Church which relies, for its moral effects, upon such optic appeals to the senses, and upon the ease with which transitory feelings can be transmuted into axioms of conduct.  Do you deny this?”

“Not at all.  I have seen enough of their system to realize its extreme simplicity.”

“And then think of the peculiar history of this island and its situation as a converging-point for men of every race and every creed.  All these things stimulate to rapid nervous discharges; that is, to inconsidered, foolish actions—­”

“All fools!” the boatman interrupted.  “All foreigners!  We people don’t do these things.  Only dam-fool foreigners.  That so, gentlemens.  They have trouble themselves, then they come to this rock and, boom! make trouble for their friends.”

“Boom!” echoed his son, who had apparently caught the drift of the old man’s speech.  Whereat the two Greek genii in the stern laughed immoderately; knowing, as they did, that the boy had not the slightest idea of what his father was talking about.