And what had he found?  He’d found that he’d never got over the jolt it had given him, there on that aimless youthful trip through Italy, with China and the Eastern seas before him, to fall in love and have all those plans for wandering cut off by the need for a safe, stable life.

Then he’d gone on.  He’d asked himself, if that’s so, then what?  He hadn’t pulled any of the moralizing stern-duty stuff; he knew Marise would rather die than have him doing for her something he hated, out of stern duty.  It was an insult, anyhow, unless it was a positively helpless cripple in question, to do things for people out of duty only.  And to mix what folks called “duty” up with love, that was the devil.  So he hadn’t.

That was the sort of thing Marise had meant, so long ago, when they were first engaged, that was the sort of thing she had asked him never to do.  He’d promised he never would, and this wasn’t the first time the promise had held him straight to what was, after all, the only decent course with a woman like Marise, as strong as she was fine.  Anything else would be treating her like a child, or a dependent, as he’d hate to have her treat him, or anybody treat him.

So this time he’d asked himself right out, what he really wanted and needed in life, and he’d been ready, honestly ready, to take any answer he got, and dree his weird accordingly, as the best thing for everybody concerned, as the only honest thing, as the only thing that would put any bed-rock under him, as what Marise would want him to do.  If it meant tramp-steamers, why it had to be tramp-steamers.  Something could be managed for Marise and the children.

This was what he had asked.  And what answer had he got?  Why, of course, he hankered for the double-jointed, lawless freedom that the tramp-steamer stood for.  He guessed everybody wanted that, more or less.  But he wanted Marise and the children a damn sight more.  And not only Marise and the children.  He hadn’t let himself lay it all on their backs, and play the martyr’s role of the forcibly domesticated wild male.  No, he wanted the life he had, outside the family, his own line of work; he wanted the sureness of it, the coherence of it, the permanence of it, the clear conscience he had about what he was doing in the world, the knowledge that he was creating something, helping men to use the natural resources of the world without exploiting either the natural resources or the men; he wanted the sense of deserved power over other human beings.  That was what he really wanted most of all.  You could call it smug and safe and bourgeois if you liked.  But the plain fact remained that it had more of what really counted for him than any other life he could see possible.  And when he looked at it, hard, with his eyes open, why the tramp-steamer to China sailed out of school-boy theatrical clouds and showed herself for the shabby, sordid little substitute for a real life she would have been to him.