Peter was one such. About my own age at this time, he was blessed with a
natural understanding which was simply Godlike. Although, like myself,
he was raised a Catholic and still pretending in a boisterous,
Rabelaisian way to have some reverence for that faith, he was amusingly
sympathetic to everything good, bad, indifferent--"in case there might
be something in it; you never can tell." Still he hadn't the least
interest in conforming to the tenets of the church and laughed at its
pretensions, preferring his own theories to any other. Apparently
nothing amused him so much as the thought of confession and communion,
of being shrived by some stout, healthy priest as worldly as himself,
and preferably Irish, like himself. At the same time he had a hearty
admiration for the Germans, all their ways, conservatisms, their
breweries, food and such things, and finally wound up by marrying a
German girl.

As far as I could make out, Peter had no faith in anything except Nature
itself, and very little in that except in those aspects of beauty and
accident and reward and terrors with which it is filled and for which he
had an awe if not a reverence and in every manifestation of which he
took the greatest delight. Life was a delicious, brilliant mystery to
him, horrible in some respects, beautiful in others; a great adventure.
Unlike myself at the time, he had not the slightest trace of any
lingering Puritanism, and wished to live in a lush, vigorous, healthy,
free, at times almost barbaric, way. The negroes, the ancient Romans,
the Egyptians, tales of the Orient and the grotesque Dark Ages, our own
vile slums and evil quarters--how he reveled in these! He was for nights
of wandering, endless investigation, reading, singing, dancing, playing!

Apropos of this I should like to relate here that one of his seemingly