enty-seven years old."
And then I said, "Twenty-seven years old and still free and fancy free?"
But how did I know she was fancy free? And the pang of new-born jealousy
put all incredulity to flight. There was no doubt about it. I was
jealous; therefore I loved. And the woman I loved was Maud Brewster.

I, Humphrey Van Weyden, was in love! And again the doubt assailed me.
Not that I was afraid of it, however, or reluctant to meet it. On the
contrary, idealist that I was to the most pronounced degree, my
philosophy had always recognized and guerdoned love as the greatest thing
in the world, the aim and the summit of being, the most exquisite pitch
of joy and happiness to which life could thrill, the thing of all things
to be hailed and welcomed and taken into the heart. But now that it had
come I could not believe. I could not be so fortunate. It was too good,
too good to be true. Symons's lines came into my head:

"I wandered all these years among
A world of women, seeking you."

And then I had ceased seeking. It was not for me, this greatest thing in
the world, I had decided. Furuseth was right; I was abnormal, an
"emotionless monster," a strange bookish creature, capable of pleasuring
in sensations only of the mind. And though I had been surrounded by
women all my days, my appreciation of them had been aesthetic and nothing
more. I had actually, at times, considered myself outside the pale, a
monkish fellow denied the eternal or the passing passions I saw and
understood so well in others. And now it had come! Undreamed of and
unheralded, it had come. In what could have been no less than an
ecstasy, I left my post at the head of the companion-way and started
along the deck, murmuring to myself those beautiful lines of Mrs.
Browning:

"I lived with visions for my company
Instead of men and women years ago,
And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know
A sweeter music than they played to me."

But the sweeter music was playing in my ears, and I was blind and
oblivious to all about me. The sharp voice of Wolf Larsen aroused me.

"What the hell are you up to?" he was demanding.

I had strayed forward where the sailors were painting, and I came to
myself to find my advancing foot on the verge of overturning a paint-pot.

"Sleep-walking, sunstroke,--what?" he barked.

"No; indigestion," I retorted, and continued my walk as if nothing
untoward had occurred.

CHAPTER XX