awares--until to my own intense surprise the harbor now became for me
a breathing, heaving, gleaming thing filled deep with the rush and the
vigor of life. A thing no longer sinister, crushing down on a man's old
age--but strangely deeply stirring.

"Look out, my friend," I warned myself. "This is no harbor you're
falling in love with."

CHAPTER IX

Although at such lucid moments I would sometimes go a-soaring up into
the most dazzling dreams, more often I would plunge in gloom. For
Eleanore's dreams and all her thoughts seemed centered on her father.
From each corner of that watery world, no matter how far we wandered,
the high tower from which he looked down on it all would suddenly loom
above the horizon. Over the dreariest marshes it peeped and into all our
talk he came. A marsh was a place that he was to transform, oily odors
were things he would sweep away. For every abuse that I could discover
her father was working out some cure. With a whole corps of engineers
drafting his dreams into practicable plans, there was no end to the
things he could do.

"Here is a girl," I told myself, "so selfishly wrapped up in her father
she hasn't a thought for anyone else. She's using me to boom his work,
as she has doubtless used writers before me and will use dozens more
when I'm gone. No doubt she would like to have _dozens of me_ sitting
right here beside her now! It's not at all a romantic thought, but think
how she could use me then!" And I would glower at her.

But it is a lonely desolate job to sit and glower at a girl who appears
so placidly unaware of the fact that you are glowering. And slowly
emerging from my gloom I would wonder about this love that was in her.
At times when she talked she made me feel small. My own love for my
mother, how utterly selfish it had been. Here was a passion so deep and
real it made her almost forget I was there, asking questions, hungrily
watching her, trying to learn about her life.

"While I was in school," she said, in that low deliberate voice of hers,
"my father and I went abroad every summer. We tramped in the Alps for
weeks at a time, keeping way off the beaten paths to watch the work of
the Swiss engineers. One of them was a woman. We saw the bridge she'd
built over a gorge, and I became deeply excited. Until then I had never
had any idea that I could go into my father's work. But now I wondered
if I could. That winter in school I really worked. I was dreadfully du