Walter Dreer—not Mark Laval—John Ashmill, Wilfrid Fraser, Skinny Wiggins had found the world laid out for them. Their pastimes and professions were at hand like their clean shirts and stockings. Like the children of the grenadier's song, each had been "born into this world alive, either a little Liberal, or else a little Conservative." Paul had been born heir to an "obstinate questioning of sense and outward things." His most familiar sensation was still that of yearning; his only means of making up to himself what the world failed to provide had been to strengthen his self-reliance. He had come to rely solely on the dictum: "Have faith in yourself and nothing can prevail against you."
His first taste of self-vindication had come to him on the day at Port Said when he had wandered away over the sands instead of rejoining his ship. His first taste of real security came in the succeeding years, when, remote from every companion of his youth, he had discovered that he was nearly impervious to further incomprehension, indifferent to public opinion. It was an unsocial and perhaps unnatural kind of security, for one of its ingredients was disdain; but more natural kinds had eluded him; every attempt to identify himself with the world—schools, musical institutions, marine disciplines—had been ill-fated.
As a child he had judged himself abnormally weak. As a man he found himself in abnormal ways strong, the strongest personage he knew, except for artists and thinkers, whom he knew only through their expression. If he were, after all, strong, why couldn't he, too, like artists and thinkers, express himself, and thus patiently reduce the emotional havoc wrought by years of disproportion. It had been humiliating to slave in ships for enough to eat; but no one had been able to impair his integrity by so much as a finger-mark. The world he had envisaged as a pack of wolves which barely tol-
