Oh, trust me, I knew the way of red blood. Such was my condition
that the red-blood health of Miss West was virtually an affront to
me--for I knew how unthinking and immoderate such blood could be.
And for five months at least--there was Mr. Pike's offered wager of a
pound of tobacco or a month's wages to that effect--I was to be pent
on the same ship with her. As sure as cosmic sap was cosmic sap,
just that sure was I that ere the voyage was over I should be
pestered by her making love to me. Please do not mistake me. My
certainty in this matter was due, not to any exalted sense of my own
desirableness to women, but to my anything but exalted concept of
women as instinctive huntresses of men. In my experience women
hunted men with quite the same blind tropism that marks the pursuit
of the sun by the sunflower, the pursuit of attachable surfaces by
the tendrils of the grapevine.
Call me blase--I do not mind, if by blase is meant the world-
weariness, intellectual, artistic, sensational, which can come to a
young man of thirty.
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