“I won’t ask you what your intentions are,” he said, with delicate irony in his tone. “You know, I am a tremendously busy man. I earn five hundred a year by hard work; but it’s no good. If you have acquired a liking for intensity in life, you can’t do without it. I mean vivid soul experience. It takes the place, with us, of the old adventure, and physical excitement.”
Siegmund looked at the other man with baffled, anxious eyes.
“Well, and what then?” he said.
“What then? A craving for intense life is nearly as deadly as any other craving. You become a concentré, you feed your normal flame with oxygen, and it devours your tissue. The soulful ladies of romance are always semi-transparent.”
Siegmund laughed.
“At least, I am quite opaque,” he said.
The other glanced over his easy, mature figure and strong throat.
“Not altogether,” said Hampson. “And you, I should think, are one whose flame goes nearly out, when the stimulant is lacking.”
Siegmund glanced again at him, startled.
“You haven’t much reserve. You’re like a tree that’ll flower till it kills itself,” the man continued. “You’ll run till you drop, and then you won’t get up again. You’ve no dispassionate intellect to control you and economize.”