Siegmund looked at the other man with baffled, anxious eyes.
“Well, and what then?” he said.
“What then? A craving for intense life is nearly as deadly as any other craving. You become a ‘concentré’; you feed your normal flame with oxygen, and it devours your tissue. The soulful ladies of romance are always semi-transparent.”
Siegmund laughed.
“At least, I am quite opaque,” he said.
The other glanced over his easy, mature figure and strong throat.
“Not altogether,” said Hampson. “And you, I should think, are one whose flame goes nearly out, when the stimulant is lacking.”
Siegmund glanced again at him, startled.
“You haven’t much reserve. You’re like a tree that’ll flower till it kills itself,” the man continued. “You’ll run till you drop, and then you won’t get up again. You’ve no dispassionate intellect to control you and economize.”
“You’re telling me very plainly what I am and am not,” said Siegmund, laughing rather sarcastically. He did not like it.
“Oh, it’s only what I think,” replied Hampson. “We’re a good deal alike, you see, and have gone the same way. You married and I didn’t; but women have always done as they liked with me.”
“That’s hardly so in my case,” said Siegmund.
Hampson eyed him critically.
“Say one woman; it’s enough,” he replied.
Siegmund gazed, musing, over the sea.
“The best sort of women—the most interesting—-
