“Disinherit me, swear out a warrant for my arrest, possibly send a squad of thugs to kidnap me and drag me back in irons. Can’t stay, anyhow. Tony’s father is coming up day after tomorrow to take command of his new yacht, with a new, paid, professional crew. Will has lost his berth aboard Black Watch, leaving Aunty Battlewagon’s house as the only reasonable alternative. No, thank you. Too many women. Aunty would count for two or three all by herself. Reminds me of something I read in Scribner’s a while back, to the effect that feminine companionship gets to be mentally enervating after a while. Find that to be true?”

“Wouldn’t know,” answered Nathaniel, sullenly. “Connie hasn’t given me much in the way of feminine companionship for me to find out. Too busy figuring which one of your college chums she wants to charm. The hell with women. Scribner’s was right about them. Mentally inebriating.”

“Enervating. Your Latin is better than your English, though I suppose women can be inebriating, too.” Will regarded him with a puckish expression. “The cure for mental enervation is to be among one’s fellows, roughing it in the open air. ‘The long day wanes, the slow moon climbs; the deep / Moans round with many voices; Come my friends, / ’Tis not too late to seek a newer world …’ Your turn.”

“ ‘Push off, and sitting well in order smite / The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds to sail beyond the sunset, and the baths / Of all the western stars, until I die …’ Jesus, Will, I love that one best of all, ‘Beyond the sunset and the baths of all the western stars.’ ”

And so they continued, answering one another like priests reading a doxology until, both bellowing the final line—“to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield”—they had infected themselves with seafever, kindled the fire that had sped young men a half century before to try their luck and test their strength in the goldfields of the West, that had shanghaied them out from under comfortable roofs to stand the trials of rounding the Horn in clipper ships: the romance and glamour of youth, and the recklessness of youth, for whom life can hold no terrors; the flame that consumes caution, blinds young men to foresight, if they have foresight to begin with, and sends them beyond the horizon to unlock what secrets may be hidden there, to behold what beauty may be lying there, to triumph over what ordeals may be waiting for them there, and the prize of that victory (never a doubt in youth’s mind that the outcome will be anything but victorious) neither glory nor renown, nor knowledge but the thing that glory, renown, or knowledge symbolize: the stature to stand with men and look them level in the eye and say, We have been somewhere and seen and done and learned and are no longer boys.