Before he had met Isolde, Warren had been possessed by a rash tendency to rush out and embrace the agenda and habits of the first stranger who’d speak kindly to him, often to disastrous effect. His deep-seated need for comradery had, among other youthful calamities, driven him into the criminal arms of bootleggers, seen him hired on by a traveling circus as a strongman, and had signed him on for a six-month stint at sea on the occasion of his twentieth birthday. War’s mother liked to say he would gladly befriend a hungry cannibal if it saved him from that most dire of all fates: solitude.
