him to think one way
as another. Mike's sycophancy was so innate that it did not appear,
and was therefore almost invariably successful. "I have been the
lover of scores of women, but I never loved one. I have always hoped
to love; it is love that I seek. I find love-tokens and I do not know
who were the givers. I have possessed nothing but the flesh, and I
have always looked beyond the flesh. I never sought a woman for her
beauty. I dreamed of a companion, one who would share each thought;
I have dreamed of a woman to whom I could bring my poetry, who could
comprehend all sorrows, and with whom I might deplore the sadness of
life until we forget it was sad, and I have been given some more or
less imperfect flesh."

"I," said Frank, "don't care a rap for your blue-stockings. I like a
girl to look pretty and sweet in a muslin dress, her hair with the
sun on it slipping over her shoulders, a large hat throwing a shadow
over the garden of her face. I like her to come and sit on my knee in
the twilight before dinner, to come behind me when I am working and
put her hand on my forehead, saying, 'Poor old man, you are tired!'"

"And you could love one girl all your life--Lizzie Baker, for
instance; and you could give up all women for one, and never wander
again free to gather?"

"It is always the same thing."

"No, that is just what it is not. The last one was thin, this one
is fat; the last one was tall, this one is tiny. The last one was
stupid, this one is witty. Some men seek the source of the Nile, I
the lace of a bodice. A new love is a voyage of discovery. What is
her furniture like? What will she say? What are her opinions of love?
But when you have been a woman's lover a month you know her morally
and physically. Society is based on the family. The family alone
survives, it floats like an ark over every raging flood. But you
may understand without being able to accept, and I cannot accept,
although I understand and love family life. What promiscuity of body
and mind! The idea of never being alone fills me with horror to lose
that secret self, which, like a shy bird, flies out of sight in the
day, but is with you, oh, how intensely in the morning!"

"Nothing pleases you so much as to be allowed to talk nonsense about
yourself."

Mike laughed.

"Let me have those opera-glasses. That woman sitting on the bench is
like her."

The trees of the embankment waved along the laughing water, and in
scores the sparro