In giving me a summary of Averill's history Drinkwater couldn't help
weaving in a partial one of his own. It was in fact most of his own,
except that it included no reference to his birth and parentage.
Drinkwater had worked his way through one of the great universities,
when laboratory research threw him in contact with Boyd Averill. The
latter was not a practising physician, but a student of biology. He was
the more at liberty to follow one of the less lucrative lines of
scientific work because of being a man of large means. Sketching the
origin of this fortune, my companion informed me that from his patron's
democratic ways no one would ever suppose him the only son, and except
for a sister the only heir, of the biggest banker in the state of New
Jersey. By one of those odd freaks of heredity which neither Sir
Francis Galton nor the great Plockendorff had been able to explain, Boyd
Averill had shown a distaste for banking from his cradle, and yet with
an interest equally difficult to account for in bacteria.
On the subject of Averill's more personal life all my friend could tell
me was that he had married Miss Lulu Winfield, once well known on the
concert stage.
"And, say," he went on, enthusiastically, "she's about the prettiest.
You'll see for yourself when you come up on deck. She'll speak to you.
Oh yes, she will," he hastened to assure me, when I began to demur.
"She won't mind. She's not a bit aristocratic, and Miss Blair says the
same."
To make conversation I asked him who was Miss Blair, learning that she
was the young lady whom Miss Averill had brought over to Europe to act
as stenographer to her brother when Drinkwater had gone to the war.
"You see," he continued to explain, "Averill's been white with me from
the start. When I left him in the lurch--after he'd paid my expenses
over to Europe and all that--because the war broke out, he didn't kick
any more than a straw dummy. When I told him I felt mean, but that this
war couldn't be going on and me not in it, he said that at my age he'd
have felt the same. One of these days I've got to pay him back that
fare. I'll do that when I've got to work in New York and saved a bit of
dough."