Then he said he'd always hoped to give me some practical business training, just as if I'd been a boy, and now the war was making it even more necessary that I should have it. If I'd been a boy he would have wanted me to go into the Cold Storage Plant here that we have an interest in, long enough for me to learn how it is carried on and what its success depends upon. Mr. Samuel Carver II is at the head of it, and Titcomb Carver and Sammy III will take it up when they're through college. But they'll be the first to enlist when the call comes. They're that kind. And if they never come back the business will be eventually turned over to strangers. He wants me to know enough about it to safeguard our interests. I was perfectly aghast at the idea. Me, not seventeen till next month, spending all my vacation shut up in an office, banging on a typewriter, with the whole free sparkling harbor outside calling to me. I'd planned such good times for this summer, a regular "under-the-rose-bush" kind, no lessons, no rules. Now not only was the sky a-falling over my particular bush, it was hitting me hard. The boat had just rounded the point when Father finished unfolding his plan, and we were leaning over the railing of the upper deck watching for the old town to come in view. For the first time it failed to look beautiful to me. The straight, ugly lines of the huge Storage plant loomed up till it seemed the biggest thing alongshore except the Pilgrim monument. That, of course, stretched up grim and stern above everything else, and looked across at me as if it knew the hard thing Father had just asked me to do. I felt that it heard the rebellious answer I was making to myself. "I can't." "You must," it answered back, as it had done all my life. "It's your duty. The idea of a descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers and the Minute Men shirking her duty!" It always gets back at me that way. It knows that the stern and rockbound Huntingdon part of me could make only one answer when Father put the matter to me the way he did. It was a sacrifice, for I had hoped to begin my new novel this summer. But I had a sort of righteous, uplifted feeling after I had consented, such as I think the martyrs must have had, which is the reward of sacrifice. It's queer what a satisfaction one can get out of that martyr feeling at times. But I was ashamed of it next morning. I was going through the hall to join Barby and Father on the porch when I heard them talking about me. "No, Judson, she's only a child. I can't bear to have her go out into the rough business world this early. There'll be time enough for that if some actual need should arise."