"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.