And now it was he who, for the first time, seemed to be at a loss to express himself.  He turned in his chair, and with a sweep of the hand indicated the long rows of musty-backed volumes.  “Here,” he said, “you have had at your disposal as well-assorted a small library as the city contains, and you have not availed yourself of it.  Yet you talk to me of literature as a profession.  I am afraid, Hugh, that this is merely another indication of your desire to shun hard work, and I must tell you frankly that I fail to see in you the least qualification for such a career.  You have not even inherited my taste for books.  I venture to say, for instance, that you have never even read a paragraph of Plutarch, and yet when I was your age I was completely familiar with the Lives.  You will not read Scott or Dickens.”

The impeachment was not to be denied, for the classics were hateful to me.  Naturally I was afraid to make such a damning admission.  My father had succeeded in presenting my ambition as the height of absurdity and presumption, and with something of the despair of a shipwrecked mariner my eyes rested on the green expanses of those book-backs, Bohn’s Standard Library!  Nor did it occur to him or to me that one might be great in literature without having read so much as a gritty page of them....

He finished his argument by reminding me that worthless persons sought to enter the arts in the search for a fool’s paradise, and in order to satisfy a reprehensible craving for notoriety.  The implication was clear, that imaginative production could not be classed as hard work.  And he assured me that literature was a profession in which no one could afford to be second class.  A Longfellow, a Harriet Beecher Stowe, or nothing.  This was a practical age and a practical country.  We had indeed produced Irvings and Hawthornes, but the future of American letters was, to say the least, problematical.  We were a utilitarian people who would never create a great literature, and he reminded me that the days of the romantic and the picturesque had passed.  He gathered that I desired to be a novelist.  Well, novelists, with certain exceptions, were fantastic fellows who blew iridescent soap-bubbles and who had no morals.  In the face of such a philosophy as his I was mute.  The world appeared a dreary place of musty offices and smoky steel-works, of coal dust, of labour without a spark of inspiration.  And that other, the world of my dreams, simply did not exist.

Incidentally my father had condemned Cousin Robert’s wholesale grocery business as a refuge of the lesser of intellect that could not achieve the professions,—­an inference not calculated to stir my ambition and liking for it at the start.