And for five months at least--there was Mr.Pike's offered wager of a pound of tobacco or a month's wages to that effect--I was to be pent on the same ship with her.

As sure as cosmic sap was cosmic sap, just that sure was I that ere the voyage was over I should be pestered by her making love to me.

Please do not mistake me.

My certainty in this matter was due, not to any exalted sense of my own desirableness to women, but to my anything but exalted concept of women as instinctive huntresses of men.

In my experience women hunted men with quite the same blind tropism that marks the pursuit of the sun by the sunflower, the pursuit of attachable surfaces by the tendrils of the grapevine.
Call me blase--I do not mind, if by blase is meant the world-weariness, intellectual, artistic, sensational, which can come to a young man of thirty.