"That dad of yours," Joe told me, "is a mighty interesting old boy. He has had a big life with a big idea."
"He hasn't! That's just the trouble. He thinks he's a comer when he's a goer--he can't see his idea is out of date. It's a pity," he added sadly. "When a man can spend his days and nights hating the trusts and the railroads as he does, it's a pity he's so darned old in his views of what ought to be done about it. Your father believes that if only we'd get a strong navy and a large mercantile marine----"
"Oh, cut it, J. K.," I said pettishly. "I tell you I don't care what he believes! The next thing you'll be telling me is that I ought to take a job in his warehouse!"
"That's just what I said. If you'd go on a paper and learn to write like a regular man I'd be tickled to death. But if all you want to be in life is a young Guy de Maupassant and turn out little gems for the girls, then I say you'd be a lot better off if you went into your father's warehouse and began telling Wall Street to get off the roof!"
From that talk Joe and I began drifting apart. I never brought him home again, I saw less of him at college. And at the end of the college year he went to New York, where he found a job on a paper.
And so all through my senior year I was left undisturbed to "queer" myself in my own sweet way, which was to slave for hours over Guy de Maupassant and other foreign authors, write stories and sketches by the score, and with two other "Ishmaelites" plan for a year's work in Paris. The French prof was delighted and spurred us on with glowing accounts of life in "the Quarter." One of us wanted to be a painter. No place for that like Paris! Another an architect--Paris! Myself a writer--Paris! For what could American writers to-day, with their sentimental little yarns covering with a laugh or a tear all the big deep facts of life, show to compare to the unflinching powerful work of the best writers over in France? In Paris they were training men to write of life as it really is! How that prof did drum it in. Better still, how he talked it up to my mother--the last time she came to college.
I soon found she was on my side. If only she could bring father around.
I still remember vividly that exciting night in June when the three of us, back there at home, sat on the terrace and fought it out. I remember the beauty of the night, I mean of the night up there in the garden under the stars, my mother's garden and her stars, and of the hideous showing put up by my father's harbor below.