Ambitious for Literary Honours
Your achievements in college, where you distinguished yourself in rhetoric and literature, would justify you in thinking seriously of a career as an author.
And the fact that your father wishes you to take charge of his brokerage business, and to relinquish your literary aspirations, should not deter you from carrying out your ambitions.
Prom your mother you inherit a mind and temperament which wholly unfit you for the pursuits your father follows and enjoys. You are no more suited to make a successful broker than he is fitted to write an Iliad.
Try and make him understand this, and try and convince him that to yield to his wishes in this matter, means the sacrifice of your tastes, the waste of your talents, and the destruction of your happiness.
If he cannot be convinced by your consistent and respectful arguments, then you must quietly, but firmly, refuse to accept a career distasteful to you.
No parent has a right to drive a child into so undesirable a path for life as this would prove to one of your nature.
Your father would think the horticulturist insane, who took a delicate fern and planted it in arid soil, on a hilltop, far from shade, and expected it to thrive and bear blossoms like the cactus.
Yet this would be no more unreasonable, than to expect a son of your temperament and inclinations to be happy and successful in Wall Street.
It is a curious study to watch parents, and to observe their utter lack of knowledge regarding a child's nature and capabilities; and to find them not only ignorant in those important matters, but unwilling to be enlightened.