The Professor's Mistress

“Old boats are like a beautiful woman,” observes a passerby on the dock as he inspects the steam yacht Galatea. “They call to you. They entice you. And then they steal your soul.” He calls that feeling “the sickness.”

William Henry Wheelock has achieved his ambition of becoming a professor of classical studies and settled down in a cottage on campus with his wife Jane and young daughter Dani. But Jane is ill-suited to the quiet, academic life and—in a fit of rage ignited by an old misunderst...