Yet he hungered. He hardly spoke to a woman throughout the voyage. But this was true: for the first time in his life Nathan had day after day to dream,—to do absolutely nothing but think.
He tried to assay his mental equipment in those long, lazy days of meditation, to determine what he was best fitted to do, how to make up for lost years, whether he should go on as a salesman and make textiles his business after his return and now that he was free,—or specialize in some profession or art. His poetry? He had long ago seen enough of life to realize it would be a dreary day before he could hope to secure a living from poetry. Well enough as a hobby, perhaps. But life meant more than compilation of romantic rhymes. He felt it too late now to go to college. But it was never too late to educate himself for some profession or art. Just what should that education be? To what purpose? What did he enjoy doing best, aside from composing rhymes? Of what could he make a success because his heart would be in his work?
One night, as the great liner swung down the northern border of tropical seas, he leaned over the railing and watched the soft, warm stars. One star in particular was very luminous and close. A snatch of an old poem came to him——
“Sometimes, dear heart, in the quiet night,
When the stars hang soft and low,
I slip away from the clash and care
To the Hills of Long Ago.
Across those hills in the whisp’ring dark,
With the night-breeze sighing through,
I see those castles we’d planned to build