n my soul, the world is getting very
old! You look like a child from school, and you talk like some quaint
little book I might have picked up on the _quais_. What does it all
mean?"

At the perplexity of the tone Max laughed. "Very little, _mon ami_! I am
no philosopher; but about this love, I have thought a little, and have
gained to a conclusion. It is like this! Light love is desire of
pleasure; great love is fear of being alone."

"Then you hold that man should be alone?"

"Why not?" Max shrugged his shoulders. "We come into the world alone; we
go out of it alone."

"A cold philosophy!"

"A true one, I think. If more lives were based upon it we would have
more achievement and less emotion."

The Irishman's enthusiasm caught sudden fire.

"And who wants less emotion? Isn't emotion the salt of life? Why, where
would a poor devil of a wanderer like myself be, if he hadn't the dream
in the back of his head that the right woman was waiting for him
somewhere?"

Max watched him seriously.

"Then you have never loved?"

"Never loved? God save us! I have been in and out of love ever since I
was seventeen. But, bless your heart, that has nothing to do with the
right woman!"

Max's intent eyes flashed. "And you think the right woman will be
content to take you--after all that?"

Blake came a step nearer, leaning over the parapet, his shoulder
touching his companion's.

"Boy," he said, in a changed tone, "listen to me. It's a big subject,
this subject of love and liking--too big for me to riddle out, perhaps.
But this I know, the world was made as it is, and neither you nor I can
change it; no, nor ten thousand cleverer than we! It's all a mystery,
and the queerest bit of mystery in it is that a man may go down into the
depths and rub shoulders with the worst, and yet keep the soul of him
clean for the one woman."

"Don't you think there are men who can do without either the depths or
the one woman?"

"There are abnormalities, of course."

Max waived the words. "I am serious. I ask you if you do not believe
that there are certain people to whom these things you speak of are poor
things--people who believe that they are sufficient unto themselves?"

The other's mouth twisted into a sarcastic smile.

"Show me the man who is sufficient unto himself!"

Swiftly--as swiftly as he had whipped the pencil from his pocket in the
_cafe_ that morning--Max stepped back, his head up, his hand resting
lightly on the