“You’re a nice boy, Jimsy, and I can’t see you turned into a poor lawyer.  You’re not hard-headed enough to be a good one.  As for being a minister, well—­no.  Go into business, dear boy, something substantial, and you’ll live to thank your stars.”

Jimsy received this advice at the time with small enthusiasm, and a reservation of criticism that was a credit to his manners, at least.  But the time came when he leaned on it.

Her own child, however, Mrs. Van Camp encouraged to a profession from the first.  “Aleck isn’t smart enough for business, but he may do something as a student,” was Mrs. Van Camp’s somewhat trying explanation; and Aleck did do something as a student.  Extremely impatient with any exhibition of laziness, the mother demanded a good accounting of her son’s time.  Aleck and Jim, who were born in the same year, ran more or less side by side until the end of college.  They struggled together in sports and in arguments, “rushed” the same girl in turn or simultaneously, and spent their long vacations cruising up and down the Maine coast in a thirty-foot sail-boat.  Once they made a more ambitious journey all the way to Yarmouth and the Bay of Fundy in a good-sized fishing-smack.

But when college was done, their ways separated.  Mrs. Van Camp, in the prime of her unusual faculties, died, having decorated the Hambleton ’scutcheon like a gay cockade stuck airily up into the breeze.  She had no part nor lot in the family pride, but understood it, perhaps, better than the Hambletons themselves.  Her crime was that she played with it.  Aleck, a full-fledged biologist, went to the Little Hebrides to work out his fresh and salad theory concerning the nerve system of the clam.

James, third son of John and Edith Hambleton of Lynn, had his eyes thoroughly opened in the three months after Commencement by a consideration of the family situation.  It seemed to him that from babyhood he had been burningly conscious of the pinching and skimping necessary to maintain the family pride.  The two older brothers were exempt from the scorching process, the eldest being the family darling and the second a genius.  Neither one could rationally be expected, “just at present,” to take up the family accounts and make the income square up with even a decently generous outgo.  And there were the girls yet to be educated.  Jim had no special talent to bless himself with, either in art or science.  He was inordinately fond of the sea, but that did not help him in choosing a career.  He had good taste in books and some little skill in music.  He was, indeed, thrall to the human voice, especially to the low voice in woman, and he was that best of all critics, a good listener.  His greatest riches, as well as his greatest charm, lay in a spirit of invincible youth; but he was no genius, no one perceived that more clearly than himself.

So he remembered Clara Van Camp’s advice, wrote the whole story to Aleck, and cast about for the one successful business chance in the four thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine bad ones—­as the statistics have it.