Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill MISS MARRIOTT AND THE FAUN "Love?" repeated Hoyting queryingly. I don't know how the word had been mentioned between us. Love doesn't bulk big in Hoyting's vocabulary, or in mine when I'm talking to him. But occasionally one comes in sight of this great natural wonder and can scarcely refrain from alluding to it. This must have been one of the occasions. "What about it?" I was curious to hear what Hoyting had to say. I could have sworn that he himself had never known the "sacred terror." His lurching bulk and his brown face have been shaped and tempered to other adventures and other solutions. What a time (I've often thought, without blasphemy) St. Peter will have with Hoyting's pack when he dumps it at the pearly gates for appraisal! No one I have ever known has wandered so far afield—disinterestedly. I don't think Hoyting has ever plucked an orchid or brought home—but he has no home—the skin of a beast. What has ever mattered to him save the encounter, in minor seas and insignificant ports, with things that, to the end, did not concern him? No Aziyades and Chrysanthemes, I feel sure, for Hoyting. "Love?" he repeated again, relaxing his huge body slowly and flinging one leg over the other. "I've seen as much of love as the next man, in more places than most. I've never been mixed up with it myself—not with the real thing. But most things are mixed upwith it. You'll believe that I don't read poetry. If you people could ever get the beat of life, you'd get it with prose. Imagine fitting human beings—black or white—into a stanzaic form! I realized that young. I've seen people make love all over the shop. I'm not denying it's effective. But the one thing I've never seen it do is really change a person. That's why I don't believe in all the things they tell me the poet...