o the harbor."

"All right, let's. I know enough about it to like it. Sue says you know
enough to hate it. I wonder which of us knows more."

"I do."

"How do you know you do?"

"Because I've been here longer," I said. "I've hated it for twenty odd
years."

She looked at me with interest. Her eyes were not at all like Sue's.
Sue's eyes were always wrapped up in herself; Eleanore's in somebody
else. They were as intimate as her voice.

"Don't you remember the evening when you took me down to the docks?" she
asked.

"I do--very well," I said.

"And do you mean to tell me you didn't like the harbor then?"

"I do--I hated the harbor then. I was scared to death that Sam and his
gang would appear around the end of a car."

"Who was Sam?" she asked me. "He sounds like a very dreadful small boy."

Soon she had me telling her of Sam and his gang and the harbor of
thrills, from the time of old Belle and the Condor.

"I was a toy piano," I said. "And the harbor was a giant who played on
me till I rattled inside. We had a big spree together."

"Not a very healthy spree, was it?" she said quietly, turning her
gray-blue eyes on mine. For some reason we suddenly smiled at each
other. "You're a good deal like your father--aren't you?" she said. "The
same nice twinkle in your eyes. Please go on. What did the harbor do to
you next?"

I thought all at once of the August day when she had lain, a girl of
twelve, in the fragrant meadow beside me. And as then, so now, the
drunken woman's image rose for an instant in my mind.

"It wiped the thrills all out," I said abruptly. I told how the place
grew harsh and bare, how I could always feel it there stripping
everything naked like itself, and how finally when later in Paris I felt
I had shaken it off for life, it had now suddenly jerked me back, let me
see what my father had really been, and had then repeated its same old
trick, closing in on his great idea and making it look like an old man's
hobby, crowding him out and handing us grimly two dull little jobs--one
to live on and one to die on.

"It's getting monotonous," I ended.

While I talked she had been watching it, now a bustling ferry crossing,
now a tug with a string of barges working up against the tide.

"How do you know it's so bad for you to be brought back from Paris?" she
asked me, without looking around.

"Have you ever been in Paris?"

"Yes--and I want to go again. But I don't believe it will ever feel