“Not he.  But I don’t really want to—­that’s the point, David, man.  You hate a business life so much yourself that you can’t get it into your blessed noddle that another man might like it.  There are many lawyers in the world—­too many, perhaps—­but there are never too many good honest men of business, ready to do clean big things for the betterment of humanity and the upbuilding of their country, to plan great enterprises and carry them through with brain and courage, to manage and control, to aim high and strike one’s aim.  There, I’m waxing eloquent, so I’d better stop.  But ambition, man!  Why, I’m full of it—­it’s bubbling in every pore of me.  I mean to make the department store of Marshall & Company famous from ocean to ocean.  Father started in life as a poor boy from a Nova Scotian farm.  He has built up a business that has a provincial reputation.  I mean to carry it on.  In five years it shall have a maritime reputation, in ten, a Canadian.  I want to make the firm of Marshall & Company stand for something big in the commercial interests of Canada.  Isn’t that as honourable an ambition as trying to make black seem white in a court of law, or discovering some new disease with a harrowing name to torment poor creatures who might otherwise die peacefully in blissful ignorance of what ailed them?”

“When you begin to make poor jokes it is time to stop arguing with you,” said David, with a shrug of his fat shoulders.  “Go your own gait and dree your own weird.  I’d as soon expect success in trying to storm the citadel single-handed as in trying to turn you from any course about which you had once made up your mind.  Whew, this street takes it out of a fellow!  What could have possessed our ancestors to run a town up the side of a hill?  I’m not so slim and active as I was on my graduation day ten years ago.  By the way, what a lot of co-eds were in your class—­twenty, if I counted right.  When I graduated there were only two ladies in our class and they were the pioneers of their sex at Queenslea.  They were well past their first youth, very grim and angular and serious; and they could never have been on speaking terms with a mirror in their best days.  But mark you, they were excellent females—­oh, very excellent.  Times have changed with a vengeance, judging from the line-up of co-eds to-day.  There was one girl there who can’t be a day over eighteen—­and she looked as if she were made out of gold and roseleaves and dewdrops.”

“The oracle speaks in poetry,” laughed Eric.  “That was Florence Percival, who led the class in mathematics, as I’m a living man.  By many she is considered the beauty of her class.  I can’t say that such is my opinion.  I don’t greatly care for that blonde, babyish style of loveliness—­I prefer Agnes Campion.  Did you notice her—­the tall, dark girl with the ropes of hair and a sort of crimson, velvety bloom on her face, who took honours in philosophy?”