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 aesthetic 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 companion-way 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.