The same doubt was in both their minds. Would Addington let him earn his living in the bald give and take of everyday commerce? Would it half patronise and half distrust him? He thought, from old knowledge of it, that Addington would behave perfectly but exasperatingly. It was passionate in its integrity, but because he was born out of the best traditions in it, a temporary disgrace would be condoned. If he opened a shop, Addington would give him a tithe of its trade, from duty and, as it would assuredly tell itself, for the sake of his father. But he didn't want that kind of nursing. He was sick enough at the accepted ways of life to long for wildernesses, ocean voyages on rough liners, where every man is worked hard enough to let his messmate alone. He was hurt, irremediably hurt, he knew, in what stands in us for the affections. But here were affections still, inflexibly waiting. They had to be reckoned with. They had to be nurtured and upheld, no matter how the contacts of life hit his own skin. He tried vaguely, and still with angry difficulty, to explain himself. "I want to stand by you, father. But you won't get much satisfaction out of me." The colonel thought he should get all kinds of satisfaction. His glance told that. How much of the contentment of it, Jeffrey wondered, with a cynical indulgence for life as it is, came from tobacco and how much from him? "You see I'm not the chap I was," he blundered, trying to open his father's eyes to the abysmal depth of his futility. "You're older," said the colonel. "And--you'll let me say it, won't you, Jeff?" He felt very timid before his rough-tongued, perhaps coarsened son. "You seem to me to have got a lot out of it." Out of his imprisonment! The red mounted to Jeffrey's forehead. He took out his pipe, emptied it carefully and laid it down. "Father," he said slowly, "I'm going to tell you the truth. When we're young we're full of yeast. We know it all. We think we're going to do it all. But we're only seething and working inside. It's a dream, I suppose. We live in it and we think we've got it all. But it's a horribly uncomfortable dream." The colonel gave his little acquiescing nod. "I wouldn't have it again," he said. "No, I wouldn't go back." "And I give you my word," said Jeffrey, slowly thinking out his way, though it looked to him as if there were really no way, "I'm as much at sea as I was then. It's not the same turmoil, but it's a turmoil. I was pulled up short. I was given plenty of time to think. Well, I thought--when I hadn't the nerve to keep myself from doing it." "You said some astonishing things in the prison paper," his father ventured. The whole thing seemed so gravely admirable to him--Jeff and the prison as the public knew them--that he wished Jeff himself could get comfort out of it.