“Go ahead,” he ordered, laconically. Albert squared his shoulders, preparatory to the plunge.
“Grandfather,” he began, “first of all I want to tell you I am sorry for—for some of the things I said this afternoon.”
He had rehearsed this opening speech over and over again, but in spite of the rehearsals it was dreadfully hard to make. If his grandfather had helped him even a little it might have been easier, but the captain merely stood there, expressionless, saying nothing, waiting for him to continue.
Albert swallowed, clenched his fists, and took a new start.
“Of course,” he began, “I am sorry for the mistakes I made in my bookkeeping, but that I have told you before. Now—now I want to say I am sorry for being so—well, so pig-headed about the rest of it. I realize that you have been mighty kind to me and that I owe you about everything that I've got in this world.”
He paused again. It had seemed to him that Captain Zelotes was about to speak. However, he did not, so the young man stumbled on.
“And—and I realize, too,” he said, “that you have, I guess, been trying to give me a real start in business, the start you think I ought to have.”
The captain nodded slowly. “That was my idea in startin' you,” he said.
“Yes—and fact that I haven't done more with the chance is because I'm made that way, I guess. But I do want to—yes, and I MEAN to try to succeed at writing poetry or stories or plays or something. I like that and I mean to give it a trial. And so—and so, you see, I've been thinking our talk over and I've concluded that perhaps you may be right, maybe I'm not old enough to know what I really am fitted for, and yet perhaps I may be partly right, too. I—I've been thinking that perhaps some sort of—of—”
“Of what?”