l this bitter movement of a labouring ship on a
frigid sea, but at the same time I do not mind it. In my brain burns the
flame of a great discovery and a great achievement. I have found what
makes all the books go glimmering; I have achieved what my very
philosophy tells me is the greatest achievement a man can make. I have
found the love of woman. I do not know whether she cares for me. Nor is
that the point. The point is that in myself I have risen to the greatest
height to which the human male animal can rise.

I know a woman and her name is Margaret. She is Margaret, a woman and
desirable. My blood is red. I am not the pallid scholar I so proudly
deemed myself to be. I am a man, and a lover, despite the books. As for
De Casseres--if ever I get back to New York, equipped as I now am, I
shall confute him with the same ease that he has confuted all the
schools. Love is the final word. To the rational man it alone gives the
super-rational sanction for living. Like Bergson in his overhanging
heaven of intuition, or like one who has bathed in Pentecostal fire and
seen the New Jerusalem, so I have trod the materialistic dictums of
science underfoot, scaled the last peak of philosophy, and leaped into my
heaven, which, after all, is within myself. The stuff that composes me,
that is I, is so made that it finds its supreme realization in the love
of woman. It is the vindication of being. Yes, and it is the wages of
being, the payment in full for all the brittleness and frailty of flesh
and breath.

And she is only a woman, like any woman, and the Lord knows I know what
women are. And I know Margaret for what she is--mere woman; and yet I
know, in the lover's soul of me, that she is somehow different. Her ways
are not as the ways of other women, and all her ways are delightful to
me. In the end, I suppose, I shall become a nest-builder, for of a
surety nest-building is one of her pretty ways. And who shall say which
is the worthier--the writing of a whole library or the building of a
nest?

The monotonous days, bleak and gray and soggy cold, drag by. It is now a
month since we began the passage of the Horn, and here we are, not so
well forward as a month ago, because we are something like a hundred
miles south of the Straits of Le Maire. Even this position is
conjectural, being arrived at by dead reckoning, based on the leeway of a
ship hove-to, now on the one tack, now on the other, with always the