“I am serious, Jack dear, I intend to marry Breck when we get back to New York and will write Daddy to that effect tonight,” Jane spoke calmly but with convincing assurance.
“It is preposterous,” Jack said hotly. “It is ridiculous to discuss it. Of course, Daddy will forbid it. If you insist, he won’t give you any money and, of course, you could hardly live on a deck hand’s salary. Besides, what would a deck hand do for a living in the winter?”
Jane smiled a little at Jack’s ideas about money. “Daddy won’t say a word in the first place, and you seem to have forgotten that the money mother left me would allow me to live very comfortably in the second place, and Breck isn’t a deck hand in the third place. Didn’t you hear what he said when he set Tim’s leg?”
“No, I was out in the tender, but anybody that has knocked around can set a leg.”
“What are your objections to him besides his lack of money?” Jane said a little contemptuously.
“A Pellew would hardly marry—”
“Oh, Jack dear, don’t say it, please,” Jane interrupted him, “it would sound so stupid and snobbish. It is only fair to tell you that his full name is Allen Breckenridge, you know the ones that live in California, and he went to Harvard and studied medicine. Then he had a fuss with his father and broke with him. He went with a French ambulance unit in the war. When he came back, he went on a newspaper and, this summer, he signed up with Mr. Wing because he wanted time to write and yet he needed money to live on while doing so. The ‘Boojum’ solved the problem. Jack, don’t you see what a peach he is?”
Jack admitted that Breck’s being a Breckenridge altered things somewhat. But he remained firm in his belief that the affair was an impossible one.
“But, Jack dear, you mustn’t change your opinion of him just because he is from one of those terrible things known as a ‘good family’—as far as that goes, I think it is a terrible family and they have behaved abominably to him. I want you to like him because he is a fine, interesting man,” Jane pleaded. She was constantly given opportunities to regret that her brother was not as open-minded as she was.
“Jane, please believe that your happiness is my chief concern. What you have told me of him seems to me condemning. I see him as an impulsive, unstable person, inclined to drifting.”