"I wonder why you decided to cross in this little boat, when we could have gone by one of the big passenger liners?" she said.
"Saved waiting, for one thing," Cliffe answered in a deprecatory tone. "Then I'll confess that I felt I'd like to do something that wasn't quite usual."
Evelyn laughed.
"It isn't a wish one would suspect you of."
"Well," Cliffe said with a twinkle, "I guess it was boyish, but we all have our weaknesses, though I don't often indulge mine. I find it doesn't pay. I'm a sober business man, but there's a streak of foolishness in me. Sometimes it works out and I feel that I want a frolic, for a change."
"Then you must have exercised some self-control."
"When I was a young man, I found my job square in front of me. I had to sit tight in the office, straighten out a business that had got rather complicated, and expand it if possible. It wasn't quite all I wanted to do, but I'd a notion that I could make my pile and then let myself go. It took me some years to get things straight, the pile was harder to make than I reckoned, and your mother had a use for all the money I could raise. Her ambition was to put the family high up in the social scale—and she's done it."
"So you stifled your longings and went on making money that we might have every advantage!" Evelyn said with a guilty feeling. "I feel ashamed when I realize it."
"I've been repaid," Cliffe replied. "Then, after a time, my job became congenial and got hold of me. The work became a habit; I didn't really want to break away." He paused and resumed with a humorous air: "It's only at odd moments I play with the notion that I'd like something different. I know it would jar me if I got it; and I'm getting old."
Evelyn mused. Her father's story had its pathetic side. Though they had not much in common, he had been her mother's willing slave: toiling in the city to further plans which Evelyn suspected he would not have made. In a sense, his life had been bare and monotonous; there was something he had missed. Evelyn thought that he recognized this, though not with regret.