It was true to my father’s character that he should have waited until the day after graduation to discuss my future, if discussion be the proper word.  The next evening at supper he informed me that he wished to talk to me in the sitting-room, whither I followed him with a sinking heart.  He seated himself at his desk, and sat for a moment gazing at me with a curious and benumbing expression, and then the blow fell.

“Hugh, I have spoken to your Cousin Robert Breck about you, and he has kindly consented to give you a trial.”

“To give me a trial, sir!” I exclaimed.

“To employ you at a small but reasonable salary.”

I could find no words to express my dismay.  My dreams had come to this, that I was to be made a clerk in a grocery store!  The fact that it was a wholesale grocery store was little consolation.

“But father,” I faltered, “I don’t want to go into business.”

“Ah!” The sharpness of the exclamation might have betrayed to me the pain in which he was, but he recovered himself instantly.  And I could see nothing but an inexorable justice closing in on me mechanically; a blind justice, in its inability to read my soul.  “The time to have decided that,” he declared, “was some years ago, my son.  I have given you the best schooling a boy can have, and you have not shown the least appreciation of your advantages.  I do not enjoy saying this, Hugh, but in spite of all my efforts and of those of your mother, you have remained undeveloped and irresponsible.  My hope, as you know, was to have made you a professional man, a lawyer, and to take you into my office.  My father and grandfather were professional men before me.  But you are wholly lacking in ambition.”

And I had burned with it all my life!

“I have ambition,” I cried, the tears forcing themselves to my eyes.

“Ambition—­for what, my son?”

I hesitated.  How could I tell him that my longings to do something, to be somebody in the world were never more keen than at that moment?  Matthew Arnold had not then written his definition of God as the stream of tendency by which we fulfil the laws of our being; and my father, at any rate, would not have acquiesced in the definition.  Dimly but passionately I felt then, as I had always felt, that I had a mission to perform, a service to do which ultimately would be revealed to me.  But the hopelessness of explaining this took on, now, the proportions of a tragedy.  And I could only gaze at him.

“What kind of ambition, Hugh?” he repeated sadly.

“I—­I have sometimes thought I could write, sir, if I had a chance.  I like it better than anything else.  I—­I have tried it.  And if I could only go to college—­”

“Literature!” There was in his voice a scandalized note.

“Why not, father?” I asked weakly.