Although countless times, waking and sleeping, St. George had
humoured himself in the outworn pastime of dreaming what he would do
if he were to inherit a million dollars, his imagination had never
marveled its way to the situation's less poignant advantages. Chief
among his satisfactions had been that with which he had lately seen
his mother--an exquisite woman, looking like the old lace and Roman
mosaic pins which she had saved from the wreck of her fortune--set
off for Europe in the exceptional company of her brother, Bishop
Arthur Touchett, gentlest of dignitaries. The bishop, only to look
upon whose portrait was a benediction, had at sacrifice of certain
of his charities seen St. George through college; and it made the
million worth while to his nephew merely to send him to Tübingen to
set his soul at rest concerning the date of one of the canonical
gospels. Next to the rich delight of planning that voyage, St.
George placed the buying of his yacht.

In the dusty, inky office of the _New York Evening Sentinel_ he had
been wont three months before to sit at a long green table fitting
words about the yachts of others to the dreary music of his
typewriter, the while vaguely conscious of a blur of eight telephone
bells, and the sound of voices used merely to communicate thought
and not to please the ear. In the last three months he had sometimes
remembered that black day when from his high window he had looked
toward the harbour and glimpsed a trim craft of white and brass
slipping to the river's mouth; whereupon he had been seized by such
a passion to work hard and earn a white-and-brass craft of his own
that the story which he was hurrying for the first edition was quite
ruined.