
Quarter, and expressing vociferously radical views upon all creation. Really, I
am frequently almost sure that I was cut out to be a radical. But then, there
are so many questions on which I am not sure. I grow timid when I am face to
face with my human frailty, which ever prevents me from grasping all the factors
in any problem - human, vital problems, you know.«
    And as he talked on, Martin became aware that to his own lips had come the
»Song of the Trade Wind«: -
 
»I am strongest at noon,
But under the moon
I stiffen the bunt of the sail.«
 
He was almost humming the words, and it dawned upon him that the other reminded
him of the trade wind, of the Northeast Trade, steady, and cool, and strong. He
was equable, he was to be relied upon, and withal there was a certain bafflement
about him. Martin had the feeling that he never spoke his full mind, just as he
had often had the feeling that the trades never blew their strongest but always
held reserves of strength that were never used. Martin's trick of visioning was
active as ever. His brain was a most accessible storehouse of remembered fact
and fancy, and its contents seemed ever ordered and spread for his inspection.
Whatever occurred in the instant present, Martin's mind immediately presented
associated antithesis or similitude which ordinarily expressed themselves to him
in vision. It was sheerly automatic, and his visioning was an unfailing
accompaniment to the living present. Just as Ruth's face, in a momentary
jealousy, had called before his eyes a forgotten moonlight gale, and as
Professor Caldwell made him see again the Northeast Trade herding the white
billows across the purple sea, so, from moment to moment, not disconcerting but
rather identifying and classifying, new memory-visions rose before him, or
spread under his eyelids, or were thrown upon the screen of his consciousness.
These visions came out of the actions and sensations of the past, out of things
and events and books of yesterday and last week - a countless host of
apparitions that, waking or sleeping, forever thronged his mind.
    So it was, as he listened to Professor Caldwell's easy flow of speech - the
conversation of a clever, cultured man - that Martin kept seeing himself down
all his past. He saw himself when he had been quite the hoodlum, wearing a
stiff-rim Stetson hat and a square-cut, double-breasted coat, with a certain
swagger to the shoulders and possessing the ideal of being as
