hair. He remembered how she had looked when he had kissed her. He had a ridiculous impulse to kiss her again, to waken her with his kisses, and to hear what she would say. He was conscious, too, as he looked at her that he had been lonely for a long time.
He told himself to go on. But something held him.
He had never analyzed, any more than anyone else ever does, the beginnings of adventures in friendship. He had always drifted pleasantly, unquestioningly, into acquaintance with women as if there never was any further stage in the relationship. He had learned little from the experience that the affair almost always proceeded on some inner compulsions of its own to the passionate and then to the tragic climax. Born to love life and love and to respect them both, he had taken them in their flow with simplicity and childlike trust, and with for a long time an incurable ignorance of the unpleasant fact that life and love by no means meant the same thing to all men or to all women. He had been a trustful lover, and inevitably a betrayed and terribly hurt lover, quite unable to realize the effect of his looks on women who had nothing more to give him than a crazed infatuation.
He had loved for their beauty and charm a few unscrupulous women who had left him bereft of any idea as to why their affections did not last. He could never imagine what it was that had wrecked the ship on a smiling sea, for he never looked out for sunken derelicts, but was always gazing at the stars or searching for enchanted islands on the skyline. He had been astounded and then embittered to learn the tales that were told of him. Why of him and not of others, he wondered. In fact, like many artists of exquisite sensibility and far-reaching imagination, he lived in a continual state of wonder at the goings on in the world about him, at motives that were not
