"To me it is like coming home," she declared. "I cannot remember when it was not familiar. Now it is like lifting the latch of the door at home after a long absence."
"I cannot imagine any one thinking of it as companionable, as a part of actual experience. I need hills and old trees and remembered turns in roads to feel the intimacy of the world. This is strange and beautiful, but leaves me an alien. It is like a kaleidoscope: nothing is twice the same."
"I do not care for things that are twice the same," she told him. "Here something is always likely to happen. The only certain thing I know of to-morrow is that we shall have plum-duff." She laughed.
He looked at her, gravely smiling.
"A certain noble discontent—you know the thought—is well; but—" he was thinking of her mother's concern, and her words carried him toward it; yet he hesitated, doubtful if it might not be too soon to speak—"but constant change means lack of purpose, doesn't it? If you set your heart on something,—something vastly different from anything you have ever known,—it will be fruitless of good unless persisted in—unless it wears grooves in your life. A mere impulse for change is to be distrusted." He smiled and added: "Don't think that I cannot give over preaching."
"I know what you mean," replied the girl, looking seaward with troubled eyes. "I suppose mother has told you what I wish. But it isn't a mere desire for change, and everybody's disapproval only makes me more eager to go. Isn't that a proof that the desire is something to be obeyed—a real call? How can I be sure that it is not, unless I try? Do you think me a silly person?" She looked at him with a suggestion of defiance, but smilingly, too.
"I should be the last one to think that," he told her. "Only look at it from all sides—that is all your friends can ask."
"Not father," she answered laughingly. "If I can be made to look at it from his point of view, he will willingly spare me the rest. Poor father! But let's not speak of it," she went on. "Look! the Mother Carey's chicken!"
She pointed to the bird, the black-and-white little creature which always seems to be hurrying home, wherever it may be. Far to the southeast a trail of smoke from an unseen steamer blotched the white sky. On the main-deck the second mate and a sailor were patching a topsail; from the galley drifted aft the cheerful whistling of the steward, like a flock of blackbirds, and the homelike sound of rattling pans. Only the man at the wheel was aft, now bending to the spokes, now glancing at the binnacle, and now turning his eye aloft to the luff of the mainsail. It was the morning of the third day out.