"Illustrates my point," muttered Dibdin, fumbling with a malodorous corn cob and a tobacco pouch.
"Point? What point?" I looked up at him abstractedly.
"Out of the blue—this book you say you yearned for—anything may happen."
"And you call yourself a scientist," I marveled, leaning back in the chair. "Things like this happen—yes. But in the serious business of life you're ground between the millstones of the gods—a victim of events you cannot control. Look at Rabelais and Montaigne, two free spirits if ever there were any. Yet one was a victim of priestcraft so that he cried out until he roared with orgiastic laughter, and the other a victim of property,—took a wife that disgusted him. (I have beautiful editions of both of them, by the way, which you ought to look at.) But each of them was a victim."
"A victim if you're victimized." Dibdin puffed at his foul pipe. (I cannot make him smoke a decent cigarette.) "But if you know how to play with circumstances, you use them as I saw a cowboy in Arizona ride a bucking broncho. You ride them till you break them. Look at me, my boy," he went on, with a grin of mingled modesty and bravado. "I knew I was a tramp at heart. But my people would have been broken with humiliation if I had turned out a 'hobo' on their hands. So I took to ruins and buried cities in out-of-the-way places, and politely speaking I'm an archeologist. But I tramp about the world to my heart's content."
That, I admit, presented Dibdin and the whole matter in a new light to me.
"Why," I finally asked, "didn't I do that?"
"Because you're not a tramp at heart," puffed Dibdin.
"Yes, I am!" I almost shouted at him. "That is exactly what I must be, since I have such a horror of home, of domesticity."
"You with all this comfort—a flat, a housekeeper, all the truck in this room? No, no, my boy! You're cast for something else. Hanged if I know for what, though. These things are too deep to generalize about. Time will tell."