seemed fated to outgrow his friends, and in retrospect saw that what he had taken for common ground was in reality no more than his friends' willingness to humour his excesses of imagination and idealism. In a sense this enhanced their worth, but it also added a drop of sadness to his cup, for he longed, at this period, to be interpreted rather than tolerated.
He was under no delusion that his mind was too great a thing to be understood; simply, it was too multifarious, too specialized. Most men presented a traceable pattern whereas he saw himself as a patchwork that defied analysis. Yet he felt there must be some principle of homogeneity running through it, some stevedoring technique at work in the loading of his inner chambers. In books he was continually reading of youths who found it difficult to weather the period of "storm and stress" but who came through all right. He supposed, he earnestly hoped, he was in their case.
In Sydney Paul had shipped on a Blue Funnel boat bound for Chinese and Japanese ports. At Nagasaki he had been left in the hospital with an attack of fever. During convalescence a pretty Englishwoman, the wife of an exporter, had brought him books and fruit, and, when he was well, invited him to her house, where he spent blissful days playing on a grand piano. Then the lady's husband rather determinedly found him a berth on a trans-Pacific passenger ship. Tickled at having aroused the jealousy of a middle-aged man, Paul eluded his benefactor and shipped on a dirty tramp trading with the Malay States, whence he wrote a most sentimental twenty-page letter to the pretty Englishwoman.
Thereafter he wandered from ship to ship, loathing his squalid surroundings, waging campaigns against animalculæ—what quantities of Keating's powder!—and ward-
