The narrator has mixed feelings about going back to school. While he wants to please his father by getting an education, he can’t help feeling that he is merely learning
about things by discussing “water imagery” while right down on the wharf he can see men actually
doing things in the water. At the end, the repetition of the question “Well, how did things go in the boat today?” suggests a return to normalcy, at least for the moment, which coincides with the father’s dramatic recovery. That recovery, though, also seems to be a part of the father’s private battle with the mother. The father has gotten the narrator to go back to school, when the mother expresses her disapproval, the father cuts the ground out from under her by getting better, such that there is no reason for the narrator to leave school. The implication is that the father is sacrificing once more by rousing himself in order to stop his son from dropping out of school.