The more usual view is less ambitious.  It is the complaint that Fortune has never looked a man’s way.  Failure due to lack of industry is excused on the ground that the goddess has proved adverse.  There is a third form of this mental disease.  A young man spoke to me in Monte Carlo the other day, and said, “I could do anything if only I had the chance, but that chance never comes my way.”  On that same evening I saw the aspirant throwing away whatever chance he may have had at the tables.

A similar type of character is to be found in the young man who consistently refuses good offers or even small chances of work because they are not good enough for him.  He expects that Luck will suddenly bestow on him a ready-made position or a gorgeous chance suitable to the high opinions he holds of his own capacities.  After a time people tire of giving him any openings at all.  In wooing the Goddess of Luck he has neglected the Goddess of Opportunity.

These men in middle age fall into a well-known class.  They can be seen haunting the Temple, and explaining to their more industrious and successful associates that they would have been Lord Chancellor if a big brief had ever come their way.  They develop that terrible disease known as “the genius of the untried.”  Their case is almost as pitiful or ludicrous as that of the man of very moderate abilities whom drink or some other vice has rendered quite incapable.  There will still be found men to whisper to each other as he passes, “Ah, if Brown didn’t drink, he might do anything.”

Far different will be the mental standpoint of the man who really means to succeed.  He will banish the idea of luck from his mind.  He will accept every opportunity, however small it may appear, which seems to lead to the possibility of greater things.  He will not wait on luck to open the portals to fortune.  He will seize opportunity by the forelock and develop its chances by his industry.  Here and there he may go wrong, where judgment or experience is lacking.  But out of his very defeats he will learn to do better in the future, and in the maturity of his knowledge he will attain success.  At least, he will not be found sitting down and whining that luck alone has been against him.

There remains a far more subtle argument in favour of the gambling temperament which believes in luck.  It is that certain men possess a kind of sixth sense in the realm of speculative enterprise.  These men, it is said, know by inherent instinct, divorced from reasoned knowledge, what enterprise will succeed or fail, or whether the market will rise or fall.  They are the children of fortune.