“To begin with, we have always disagreed from the time he sent me to a norfolk-jacket-and-buster-brown-collar-country-school-for-rich-little-boys and I wanted to wear a jersey and go to a public school in town. Not that I didn’t love the country, because the part of my life I remember with most pleasure is the summers I spent on my uncle’s ranch in the west.” Breck’s sunburned face took on the sad look that was so distressing to Jane. He continued, “A surprising thing happened. Both of us agreed on my going to Harvard and finally on my going into medicine. Everything was all right for two years and a half, when, at Christmas vacation, I decided to spend my holidays with some friends in New York instead of taking the trip across the continent to spend the time with my family in California.”
“But surely, just the failure to be with him at Christmas was not enough to cause a real breach,” Jane broke in.
“No, but what happened next was,” Breck went on. “My two friends and I had ridiculously large allowances. One night, we thought it would be fun to go slumming and see how the other half lived. For their sakes, I hope they have forgotten. For my part, I don’t believe I ever shall. The wretchedness, the sick misery of those people! At any rate, after my trip, I became fired with a great desire to do something for those people and wrote home to Father that I intended to hang out my shingle in the east side and, of course, practice for nothing. It never entered my head that Father wouldn’t abet me in such a work. He is very, very rich indeed and I thought that he would not only continue my allowance but probably give me large donations from time to time so that I might be able even to have an infirmary in connection with my office. My dream was short lived. When I got back to college, I found a curt note saying that my plan was ridiculous and that my allowance would be stopped immediately and that he would decline to foot the bill for my tuition with any such career in view. I wrote him in reply that I intended to do as I had written him before. He made good his threat and I stayed on at college for a few months, doing that supposedly romantic thing, ‘working my way through’ mostly by selling short things to small magazines. It is something that no one should be allowed to do too, let me tell you. Why there aren’t more cases of brain fag among the students that attempt it, I don’t see. Then things got so rotten on the other side that I couldn’t stand not being in it. So at last I got over with a bunch of my older friends with a French ambulance unit.”
Dismissing the part he played in the war as rapidly as possible, he hurried on to tell of what took place at his return.
“When you came back from overseas, didn’t his attitude change toward you a bit?” Jane asked anxiously.
“Oh, of course, I suppose he was proud of me in a way. They gave a huge ball and my sister made me meet all her blasé friends. After being so close to the realities, all their little affectations and vanities grated on me terribly. At any rate, after a very melodramatic scene in which my father offered to forget my silliness at Harvard and take me in as a junior partner in his tremendous exporting business, I saw that it wasn’t any use arguing, so I just told them good-bye and came to New York and got a job as reporter for one of the papers. Don’t let me bore you to death, will you, Jane? Everybody likes to talk about himself, I suppose, and it means an awful lot to me to be able to talk to somebody. I am not whining around for sympathy, you know that, don’t you?” he said quickly. “And I don’t mean to run down my family, they are all right in their way. We just don’t hit it off.”
“I know,” Jane said, “some people seem to get born in the wrong families and some families just seem to have the wrong children. But how did you happen to come on the ‘Boojum’?”
“I thought that, if I got outdoors, I would be able to write better stuff. You see, after I had been writing regular newspaper things all day, I needed to get out and do something else at night besides sitting in my room and writing at stories. Out on the coast at home, I had always had a boat of some sort or other and I was crazy about the water. So I thought that I could make enough money to see me through the summer, get a chance to do some writing and put in an enjoyable healthy summer if I signed on as deck hand on some yacht. ‘Boojum’ happened to be the one. So far, it is the best thing that has happened to me.”
“Wasn’t it awful hard pretending that you were just a plain deck hand? When we talked about things you knew about, didn’t you want to butt in?”
“It was harder than I dreamed it would be. I thought that you girls would be like my sister’s friends and, knowing how rich Mr. Wing was, I thought that he would run his yacht just as most of the sound yachtsmen do, as though it was some fragile little boat that couldn’t stand an all day sail, or rather that he couldn’t. When I found out what a peach of a bunch you all were and I realized what my position was, I admit I used to get pretty gloomy.”