ow what Addington
is. Before I knew it, I should be a cause. Can't you and I hatch up
something?"

The colonel hesitated.

"It would be simple enough," he said, "if I had any capital."

"You haven't," said Jeff, rather curtly, "for me to fool away. What
you've got you must save for the girls."

The same doubt was in both their minds. Would Addington let him earn his
living in the bald give and take of everyday commerce? Would it half
patronise and half distrust him? He thought, from old knowledge of it,
that Addington would behave perfectly but exasperatingly. It was
passionate in its integrity, but because he was born out of the best
traditions in it, a temporary disgrace would be condoned. If he opened a
shop, Addington would give him a tithe of its trade, from duty and, as
it would assuredly tell itself, for the sake of his father. But he
didn't want that kind of nursing. He was sick enough at the accepted
ways of life to long for wildernesses, ocean voyages on rough liners,
where every man is worked hard enough to let his messmate alone. He was
hurt, irremediably hurt, he knew, in what stands in us for the
affections. But here were affections still, inflexibly waiting. They had
to be reckoned with. They had to be nurtured and upheld, no matter how
the contacts of life hit his own skin. He tried vaguely, and still with
angry difficulty, to explain himself.

"I want to stand by you, father. But you won't get much satisfaction out
of me."

The colonel thought he should get all kinds of satisfaction. His glance
told that. How much of the contentment of it, Jeffrey wondered, with a
cynical indulgence for life as it is, came from tobacco and how much
from him?

"You see I'm not the chap I was," he blundered, trying to open his
father's eyes to the abysmal depth of his futility.

"You're older," said the colonel. "And--you'll let me say it, won't
you, Jeff?" He felt very timid before his rough-tongued, perhaps
coarsened son. "You seem to me to have got a lot out of it."

Out of his imprisonment! The red mounted to Jeffrey's forehead. He took
out his pipe, emptied it carefully and laid it down.

"Father," he said slowly, "I'm going to tell you the truth. When we're
young we're full of yeast. We know it all. We think we're going to do it
all. But we're only seething and working inside. It's a dream, I
suppose. We live in it and we think we've got it all. But it's a
horribly uncomfortable dream."

The colonel g