stretches of yellow beach, where a brazen ocean tumbled and hissed. Then
many cities, squalid and splendid, colorful and fantastic as the
erection of a dream, and through all these he saw himself ever passing,
appearing and reappearing, and ever scattering his substance, not the
substance of money alone; that was still left him; but the substance of
youth, of early promise, of illusion and hopes.

Pearl waited a long time, it seemed to her, for him to speak. At last
she broke the silence. "And then?" she said.

He roused from his preoccupations and brushed back the wing of hair from
his brow. "I realized that I was living, had always lived on husks, and
that was what caused the restless fever in my blood, my heart was
always restless; and then I began to dream down there in the tropics,
really dream at night of these mountains just as you see them here, and
in the day time I thought of them and longed for them, as a man whose
throat is dry with thirst longs for cool water. Then, presently, I began
to have brief, fleeting visions of them by day. And gradually the
longing for the hills became so intense that I started out in search of
them. I traveled about a good bit, and then drifted here. The place
suited me, so I stayed."

She looked at him puzzled and half-fearfully, wondering if he was quite
sane. "And will you stay here always?" she asked.

"Oh, as to that, I can't say. Perhaps. I hope so. Life is full here."

"Full!" she interrupted him. "And life! You call this life?" She laughed
in harsh scorn.