266 MYSTIC ISLES 



ure, but there was no sign of eighty years in him. Rid 

 of that white, hirsute mask, so associated with age, Stro- 

 ganoff might have been twenty years younger. I said 

 so, but it did not allay his yearning. 



"I am well enough," he said, "because I have not dis- 

 sipated for thirty years. I turned a leaf, as did Leo 

 Nikolaievitch, after 'War and Peace.' Now I feel 

 myself slipping into the grave." 



He gazed ruminantly away from the lagoon to the 

 pool of Psyche, where the Tahitian women squatted on 

 their shapely haunches and thumped their clothes. 



"See," he said earnestly. "I am old and useless. 

 Why should not Steinach or the others make the grand 

 experiment on me? If they succeed, very good; if they 

 fail, there is no loss. They say those glands make a 

 man over, no matter what his age. I offer myself 

 freely. I am not afraid of death. Me, I am a philoso- 

 pher." 



He spoke excitedly. His eyes were fixed on distance, 

 and I followed them. 



Auro, the Golden One, as her name meant, had been 

 washing her muslin slips in the pool of Psyche, and now 

 stood in the entrance to it. She was for a fleeting sec- 

 ond in her pareu only, her tunic raised above her head to 

 pull on, and her enravishing form disclosed from her 

 waist to her piquant face, over which tumbled her opu- 

 lent locks. 



It flashed on me that, wise and old as he was, the 

 spectrum of the philosopher's soul had all the colors of 

 the ignorant and the young. I looked from the nymphs 

 of the pool to his darkening eyes, and I had a revelation 

 of the persistence of common humanity in the most 



