“You forget that I am a lawyer.”
“And you prefer to be that, a lawyer, rather than an author?”
“It is not exactly what I prefer, Miss Mavick.”
“Why not? Does anybody do anything well if his heart is not in it?”
“But circumstances sometimes compel a man.”
“I like better for men to compel circumstances,” the girl exclaimed, with that disposition to look at things in the abstract that Philip so well remembered.
“Perhaps I do not make myself understood. One must have a career.”
“A career?” And Evelyn looked puzzled for a moment. “You mean for himself, for his own self?” There is a lawyer who comes to see papa. I've been in the room sometimes, when they don't mind. Such talk about schemes, and how to do this and that, and twisting about. And not a word about anything any of the time. And one day when he was waiting for papa I talked with him. You would have been surprised.
“I told papa that I could not find anything to interest him. Papa laughed and said it was my fault, he was one of the sharpest lawyers in the city. Would you rather be that than to write?”
“Oh, all lawyers are not like that. And, don't you know, literature doesn't pay.”