t grief. All at once the idea popped into my head that I
too might become a great preacher. And still greater, I soon learned, I
might become a preacher who went far off to heathen lands, braving
cannibals and death and giving to thousands of heathen eternal happiness
and life. Our church was sending out such a man. I heard him described
as a hero of God, and I thought of pictures I had seen of saints and
martyrs with soft haloes around their heads.

But this hero of God came down to the harbor. He was to sail for China
from my father's dock. He wore, I remember, a brown derby hat and a
little top coat. He was thin, with stooping shoulders, he was flustered
in the excitement of leaving, nervously laughing as he shook hands with
admiring women and talking fast in his high jerky voice. Two big dockers
trundled his trunks. I saw them grin at the little man and spit tobacco
juice his way. My father came by, shot one contemptuous glance, and then
went on board to his business. I looked back at the hero. Off fell the
halo from his head.

"No," I said gloomily to myself, "I never want to be like you." And
drearily I looked around. What heaps and heaps of business here. What an
immense gray harbor. I found no more thrills in church after that.

And as with religion, so with love. In reading of men of the Golden Age
I came upon stories of high romance that made me strangely happy. But I
saw no love of this kind in our house. I saw my mother and father living
sharply separate lives, and I saw few kisses between them. I saw my
father absorbed in his business, with little time for my mother. And I
blamed this on the harbor. Long ago the same grim place had taught me
something else about this many-sided passion between men and women, and
one day it rose suddenly up in my mind:

I must have been about fifteen when my little friend Eleanore Dillon
came back. Soon she and Sue were intimate chums, they went to school
together. My mother invited her up to the mountains, and there I was
with her a good deal. She was now nearly twelve years old, and the life
in the West with her father had left her sturdy as you please. And yet
somehow she still seemed to me the same feminine little creature, and as
she told me stories of the life out West, where her father, who was an
engineer, had built bridges, planned out harbors and new cities, I would
wonder vaguely about her. What a fresh, clean little person to be
talking of such places.

She