“What I want to do now more than anything,” said Evans, “is to go for a good long cruise in my own boat when I can go where I want, turn in when I want, and get up when I want.”
“I’ll do that with you when we get home,” said Mortimer.
“That’s a go,” echoed Evans warmly. “Don’t forget it.”
“You bet I won’t,” said Mortimer.
4
Before the end of the winter these two young men were back in college, finishing the courses they had begun. The summer vacations were for Mortimer so well occupied with house parties and travel that the promised cruise was forgotten.
After college Mortimer studied law. As a student of this profession, though of average thoroughness, he was more especially characterized by brilliance; he could take in the “headlines” of a subject quickly and well. After a short apprenticeship as a lawyer, he turned his attention to politics in which he made for himself a brilliant and successful career.
Evans took up research in physics as his life-work, and after a year in the great Cavendish Laboratory of Cambridge, England, he found a place in the physics department of one of the leading American universities. His researches dealt with the problems of atomic structure and dynamics, and in this work he was deeply absorbed, giving little time to anything else, except during his vacations when he made a point each year of taking a substantial allowance of outdoor life, usually cruising in a small sailboat along the New England coast and often as far as Nova Scotia or the Gulf of Saint Lawrence. Thus he kept the elasticity of youth, and with it an ever-increasing self-reliance, so that no problem presented to him by wind or tide or fog could catch him without adequate resource.
Three years after graduation the class of which Evans and Mortimer were members held a reunion at their Alma Mater in June. Mortimer, now as always the leader in his class, was the central figure, usually surrounded by groups of warm friends chatting about old times and war times, or discussing questions of the day. Once during the reunion he contrived to get off in a corner with Evans.
“What about that cruise we planned in London?” he said. “Six years have gone by and we don’t seem to have pulled it off yet.”