“You acted like the dear fellow I always knew you were in the first instance, but why is it the same now?  It’s not for his sake, surely, for, for all you know, from where he is now, the sight of you going on with that work may not give him pleasure, but pain.”

“No; I went into it to please him, but now he’s gone that’s ended.”

“Then it’s not the same now.  Why do you say you’d feel like a sneak if you changed?  There is, I think, no goddess or patron saint of the trade, who would be personally offended at your desertion.”

“You don’t understand at all.  I’m sick—­just sick, of seeing men trying to find something grand enough to do, instead of trying to do the first thing they can grandly.”

“I haven’t noticed that men are so set on rising.”

“No, not always; but when they’re not ambitious enough to get something fine to do, they’re not ambitious enough to do what they do well, unless it’s for the sake of money.  Look at the fellows that went to school with us, half of them shopkeepers’ sons.  How many of them went in with their fathers?  Just those who were mean enough to care for nothing but money-making, and those who were too dull to do anything else.”

“The education they got was good enough to give them a taste for higher callings.”

“Yes”—­with a sneer—­“and how the masters gloried over such brilliant examples as yourself, who felt themselves ‘called higher,’ so to speak!  You had left school by the time I came to it, but I had your shining tracks pointed out to me all along the way, and old Thompson told me that Wolsey’s father was ‘in the same line as my papa,’ and he instructed me about Kirke White’s career; and I, greedy little pig that I was, sucked it all in till I sickened.  I’ve never been able to feed on any of that food since.”

In a moment the other continued, “Well, in spite of the fact that our own father was too true and simple ever to be anything but a gentleman, it remains true that the choice of this trade and others on a level with it—­”

“Such as hunting and shooting, or the cooking of meats that ladies are encouraged to devote themselves to.”

“I was saying—­the choice of this trade, or of others on a level with it, be they whatever they are, implies something coarse in the grain of the average man who chooses it, and has a coarsening effect upon him.”

“If the old novels are any true picture of life, there was a time when every cleric was a place-hunter.  Would you have advised good men to keep out of the church at that time?  I’m told there’s hardly an honourable man in United States politics:  is that less reason, or more, for honest fellows to go into public life there?” (Impatience was waxing again.  The words fell after one another in hot haste.) “There’s a time coming when every man will be taught to like to keep his hands clean and read the poets; and will you preach to them all then that they mustn’t be coarse enough to do necessary work, or do you imagine it will be well done if they all do an hour a day at it in amateur fashion?  You’re thoroughly inconsistent,” he cried.