"But I was making up my mind. Somehow or other, in spite of my twenty-five years in cotton-wool, I had imagination enough to see in my uncle's weather-beaten old face something that was not in the city faces I saw every day. He had come into London out of an alien world. Then, I argued, there are other worlds beside this one! I had not realized it before! All the time I was snug in my little job in Victoria Street men were out on the sea, out in the heat and cold and wet, living in a totally different world to mine. You may think it a foolish and common enough idea, but to me it was dazzling, blinding. It took hold of me. I could think of nothing else. I said, 'I'll go, but I can't go to-night, I've nothing to wear.' So my uncle told me to go to Cardiff and meet the _Corydon_ at Barry Dock.
"'What's she like?' I said, standing up. He took me into another office, and showed me a beautiful model of a steamer.
"'There she is,' he says. 'That's the old _Corydon_. I commanded her for three years.' I can tell you I was pleased to think I was going to sea in such a fine ship. Humph!
"I went home and had a talk with my mother. All _her_ ideas were capsized too. Here was her eldest son, the quiet, studious, respectable elder son, out of employment, while her harum-scarum disobedient Frank was getting three hundred a year and with good prospects. She was all bewildered by it. You can't blame her. She looked at me when I told her what I was going to do. 'Take plenty of socks,' she said, quietly. 'You'll need them at sea.' And I suddenly remembered she'd done the very same thing I was to do, long ago; broken out of her life and made a fresh start--on the sea.
"And what had happened to me? You'll think I was a pretty cheap sort of a lover to let my brother cut me out so easy as that. You'll say I never really loved her. Who can tell that? Who can say how much or how little he loves? Yes, yes, I loved her. But what, I ask you, is the use of a man mooning his life away for a girl who has never given him a minute's thought? It is a waste of time and energy and life. When that view of worlds outside of mine broke on me the love-trance broke. I said to myself: 'I am young; I will go out and see things.' Well, I went out and I saw things, and I don't regret it. But there's one thing we never see again, and that's the illusion of first love.