This I knew: I had reached an intellectual and artistic climacteric, a life-climacteric of some sort.

And I had diagnosed my own case and prescribed this voyage.

And here was the atrociously healthy and profoundly feminine Miss West along--the very last ingredient I would have considered introducing into my prescription.
A woman! Woman! Heaven knows I had been sufficiently tormented by their persecutions to know them.

I leave it to you: thirty years of age, not entirely unhandsome, an intellectual and artistic place in the world, and an income most dazzling--why shouldn't women pursue me?
They would have pursued me had I been a hunchback, for the sake of my artistic place alone, for the sake of my income alone.
Yes; and love! Did I not know love--lyric, passionate, mad, romantic love?
That, too, was of old time with me.

I, too, had throbbed and sung and sobbed and sighed--yes, and known grief, and buried my dead.