Mrs. Cortlandt smiled.  “By-the-way, when are you going into business with him?” she said.

“I?  Oh, not for a long time.  You see, I’m so busy I never seem to have time to work.  Work doesn’t really appeal to me, anyway.  I suppose if I had to hustle I could, but—­what’s the use?”

“What is it that keeps you so busy?  What are you going to do when you get back, for instance?”

“Well, I’m going to Ormond for the auto races, and I may enter my new car.  If I don’t get hurt in the races I’ll take a hunting trip or two.  Then I want to try out an iceboat on the Hudson, and I’ll have to be back in New Haven by the time the baseball squad limbers up.  Oh, I have plenty of work ahead!”

Mrs. Cortlandt let her eyes dwell upon him curiously for a moment; then she said: 

“Have you no ambition?”

“Certainly.”

“What is it?”

“Why—­” Kirk hesitated.  “I can’t say right off the reel, but I’ve got it—­lots of it.”

“Is there no—­girl, for instance?  Have you never been in love?”

“Oh, see here, now!” Anthony blushed in a manner to excite the envy of any woman.  “I don’t like ’em.  I’d rather play football.”

“That explains something.  When the time comes you will cease wasting your life and—­”

“I’m not wasting my life,” the young man denied hotly.  “I’m having a great time; simply immense.”

“I remember reading an article once by a man who attacked American colleges with bitter personal feeling, on the ground that they fostered exactly the attitude toward life which you have just expressed.”

Anthony looked sober.  “That was my father,” he said.

“Really!  How stupid of me to forget the name.  But I don’t agree with him,” she continued, gently.  “You merely lack stimulus.  If you should meet the right woman—­” Then, seeing the amusement in his face; “Believe me, I know what I am talking about.  I know what a woman can do.  Your life has been too easy and placid.  You need some disturbing element to make it ferment.”

“But I don’t want to ferment.”

“Why don’t you stay in Panama and go to work?”

“Work?  Hideous word!  For one thing, I haven’t time.  I must get back—­”

“You will find great opportunities there.”

“But how about the girl who is to sour the syrup of my being and make it ferment?”

“Oh, she may appear at any moment; but, joking aside, you had better think over what I have said.”  She left him with an admonitory shake of her head.

The Santa Cruz was now rapidly drawing out of the cold northern winter and into a tropic warmth.  Already the raw chill of higher latitudes was giving way to a balmy, spring-like temperature, while the glittering sunshine transformed the sea into a lively, gleaming expanse of sapphire.  The nights were perfect, the days divine.  The passengers responded as if to a magic draught, and Kirk found his blood filled with a new vigor.