, seeking you.«
 
    And then I had ceased seeking. It was not for me, this greatest thing in the
world, I had decided. Furuseth was right; I was abnormal, an »emotionless
monster,« a strange bookish creature, capable of pleasuring in sensations only
of the mind. And though I had been surrounded by women all my days, my
appreciation of them had been æsthetic and nothing more. I had actually, at
times, considered myself outside the pale, a monkish fellow denied the eternal
or the passing passions I saw and understood so well in others. And now it had
come! Undreamed of and unheralded, it had come. In what could have been no less
than an ecstasy, I left my post at the head of the companionway and started
along the deck, murmuring to myself those beautiful lines of Mrs. Browning:
 
»I lived with visions for my company
Instead of men and women years ago,
And found them gentle mates, nor thought to know
A sweeter music than they played to me.«
 
But the sweeter music was playing in my ears, and I was blind and oblivious to
all about me. The sharp voice of Wolf Larsen aroused me.
    »What the hell are you up to?« he was demanding.
    I had strayed forward where the sailors were painting, and I came to myself
to find my advancing foot on the verge of overturning a paint-pot.
    »Sleep-walking, sunstroke, - what?« he barked.
    »No; indigestion,« I retorted, and continued my walk as if nothing untoward
had occurred.
 

                                  Chapter XXIV

Among the most vivid memories of my life are those of the events on the Ghost
which occurred during the forty hours succeeding the discovery of my love for
Maud Brewster. I, who had lived my life in quiet places, only to enter at the
age of thirty-five upon a course of the most irrational adventure I could have
imagined, never had more incident and excitement crammed into any forty hours of
my experience. Nor can I quite close my ears to a small voice of pride which
tells me I did not do so badly, all things considered.
    To begin with, at the midday dinner, Wolf Larsen informed the hunters that
they were to eat thenceforth in the steerage. It was an unprecedented thing on
sealing schooners, where it is the custom for the hunters to rank unofficially
as officers. He gave no reason, but his motive was obvious enough. Horner and
Smoke had been displaying a gallantry toward Maud Brewster, ludicrous in itself
and inoffensive to her, but