They're the same from Cape Horn to Alaska, from Dublin to Rio."

He bellowed forth his invective. He had no quarrel with marriage as an
institution. It was most useful and salutary--apparently because it
provided him, Jaffery, with comfortable conditions wherein to exist. The
multitude of harmless, necessary males (like myself) were doomed to it.
But there was a race of Chosen Ones, to which he belonged, whose
untamable and omni-concupiscent essence kept them outside the dull
conjugal pale. For such as him, nineteen hundred women at once,
scattered within the regions of the seven circumferential seas. He loved
them all. Woman as woman was the joy of the earth. It was only the silly
spectrum of civilisation that broke Woman up into primary
colours--black, yellow, brunette, blonde--he damned civilisation.

"To listen to you," said I, when he paused for breath, "one would think
you were a devil of a fellow."

"I am," he declared. "I'm a Universalist. At any rate in theory, or
rather in the conviction of what best suits myself. I'm one of those men
who are born to be free, who've got to fill their lungs with air, who
must get out into the wilds if they're to live--God! I'd sooner be
snowed up on a battlefield than smirk at a damned afternoon tea-party
any day in the week! If I want a woman, I like to take her by her hair
and swing her up behind me on the saddle and ride away with her--"

"Lord! That's lovely," said I. "How often have you done it?"

"I've never done that exactly, you silly ass," said he. "But that's my
attitude, my philosophy. You see how impossible it would be for me to
tie myself for life to the stay-strings of one flip of a thing in