Siberia suited Mark Griffin's present mood, which was to be alone. He
had never married, never even been in love, at least, not since
boyhood. Of course, that had been mere puppy love. Still, it was
something to look back to and sigh over. He liked to think that he
could still feel a sort of consoling sadness at the thought of it. He,
a timid, dreaming boy, had loved a timid, dreaming girl. Her brother
broke up the romance by taunting Mark who, with boyish bashfulness,
avoided her after that. Then her parents moved to London and Mark was
sent to school. After school he had traveled. For the last ten years
England had been merely a place to think of as home. He had been in
India, and South America, and Canada--up on the Yukon. He would have
stayed there, but somebody suggested that he might be a remittance man.
Ye gods! a remittance man with ten thousand pounds a year! And who
could have had much more, for Mark Griffin was a master with his pen.
His imagination glowed, and his travels had fanned it into flame.
Every day he wrote, but burned the product next morning. What was the
use? He had plenty to live on. Why write another man out of a job?
And who could be a writer with an income of ten thousand pounds a year?
But, just the same, it added to Mark Griffin's self-hatred to think
that it was the income that made him useless. Yet he had only one real
failure checked against him--the one at Oxford. But he knew--and he
did not deceive himself--why there had been no others. He had never
tried.

But there was one thing in Mark's favor, too. In spite of his
wandering, in spite of the men and women of all kinds he had met, he
was clean. There was a something in the memory of his mother--and in
the memory, too, of that puppy love of his--that had made him a fighter
against himself.