cook here. Soon I was able to run the boat and even to help my father
a little. I knew just enough about his work to go places for him and
save his time. I'd forgotten I ever had any nerves, for I felt I
belonged to something now that got way down to the roots of things. Do
you see what I mean? This harbor isn't like a hotel, or an evening gown
or Weber and Fields. I love pretty gowns, and my father and I wouldn't
miss Weber and Fields for worlds. But they're all on top, this is down
at the bottom, it's one of those deep places that seem to make the world
go 'round. It's right where the ocean bumps into the land. You can get
your roots here, you can feel you are real.

"You see what my father is doing is to take this whole harbor and study
it hard--not just the water, the shipping and docks, for when he says
'the port of New York' he means all the railroads too--and he's
studying how they all come in and why it is that everything has become
so frightfully snarled. A lot of big shipping men are behind him, and
he's to draw up a plan for it all which they're going to give to the
city to use, to make this port what it's got to be, the very first in
the ocean world. It's one of those slow tremendous pieces of work, it
will take years to carry it out and hundreds of millions of dollars. My
father thinks there's hardly a chance that he'll ever live to see it all
done. I know he will, I'm sure he will, he's the kind of a man who keeps
himself young. But whether he really sees it or not, or gets any credit,
he doesn't care.

"That's the kind of a person my father is," Eleanore added softly.

* * * * *

"My father wants to meet you," she told me toward the end of June, at
one of those times when she let the boat drift while we had long
absorbing talks. "He has read that thing you wrote about the German sea
hog, and he thinks it's awfully well done."

"That's good of him," I said gruffly.

Somehow or other it always makes me uncomfortable when people talk about
my work. When they criticize I am annoyed and when they praise I am
uneasy. What do they know about it? They spent an hour reading what it
took me weeks to write. They don't know what I _tried_ to do, nor do
they care, they haven't time. I never feel so cut off from people, so
utterly alone in the world, as when some benevolent person says, "I
liked that little story of yours." Instantly I shut up like a clam.

"I liked it too," said