"They don't!" she retorted indignantly. "They take it out miles beyond the Hook!" In short, I considered myself mighty clever. Day by day I prolonged my conversion, holding obstinately back--while Eleanore revealed to me the miracles worked by the sunset here, and by the clouds, the winds, the tides, the very smoke and the ships themselves, all playing weird tricks on each other. Slowly the crude glory of it stole upon me unawares--until to my own intense surprise the harbor now became for me a breathing, heaving, gleaming thing filled deep with the rush and the vigor of life. A thing no longer sinister, crushing down on a man's old age--but strangely deeply stirring. "Look out, my friend," I warned myself. "This is no harbor you're falling in love with." CHAPTER IX Although at such lucid moments I would sometimes go a-soaring up into the most dazzling dreams, more often I would plunge in gloom. For Eleanore's dreams and all her thoughts seemed centered on her father. From each corner of that watery world, no matter how far we wandered, the high tower from which he looked down on it all would suddenly loom above the horizon. Over the dreariest marshes it peeped and into all our talk he came. A marsh was a place that he was to transform, oily odors were things he would sweep away. For every abuse that I could discover her father was working out some cure. With a whole corps of engineers drafting his dreams into practicable plans, there was no end to the things he could do. "Here is a girl," I told myself, "so selfishly wrapped up in her father she hasn't a thought for anyone else. She's using me to boom his work, as she has doubtless used writers before me and will use dozens more when I'm gone. No doubt she would like to have _dozens of me_ sitting right here beside her now! It's not at all a romantic thought, but think how she could use me then!" And I would glower at her. But it is a lonely desolate job to sit and glower at a girl who appears so placidly unaware of the fact that you are glowering. And slowly emerging from my gloom I would wonder about this love that was in her. At times when she talked she made me feel small. My own love for my mother, how utterly selfish it had been. Here was a passion so deep and real it made her almost forget I was there, asking questions, hungrily watching her, trying to learn about her life.