“Wouldn’t he? If it were not such a risk, I’d try it, just to convince you. You seem to have a very exalted idea of Jack Ralston, altogether. I’ve not. Do you know anything about his life?”
“Of course I do. I know how you all talk about the chances you’ve given him—between you. And I know just what they were—to try his hand at being a lawyer’s clerk first, and a banker’s clerk afterwards, with no salary and—”
“If he had stuck to either for a year he would have had a very different sort of chance,” interrupted the old gentleman. “I told him so. There was little enough expected of him, I’m sure—just to go to an office every day, as most people do, and write what he was told to write. It wasn’t much to ask. Take the whole thing to pieces and look at it. What can he do? What do most men do who must make their way in the world? He has no exceptional talent, so he can’t go in for art or literature or that sort of thing. His father wouldn’t educate him for the navy, where he would have found his level, or where the Admiral’s name would have helped him. He didn’t get a technical education, which would have given him a chance to try engineering. There were only two things left—the law or business. I explained all that to him at the time. He shook his head and said he wanted something active. That’s just the way all young men talk who merely don’t want to stay in-doors and work decently hard, like other people. An active life! What is an active life? Ranching, I suppose he means, and he thinks he should do well on a ranch merely because he can ride fairly well. Riding fairly well doesn’t mean much on a ranch. The men out there can all ride better than he ever could, and he knows nothing about horses, nor cattle, nor about anything useful. Besides, with his temper, he’d be shot before he’d been out there a year—”
“But there are all sorts of other things, and you forget Hamilton Bright, who began on a ranch—”
“Ham Bright is made of different stuff. He had been brought up in the country, too, and his father was a Western man—from Cincinnati, at all events, though that isn’t West nowadays. No. Jack Ralston could never succeed at that—and I haven’t a ranch to give him, and I certainly won’t go and buy land out there now. I repeat that his only chance lay in law or business. Law would have done better. He had the advantage of having a degree to begin with, and I would have found him a partner, and there’s a lot of law connected with real estate which doesn’t need a genius to work it, and which is fairly profitable. But no! He wanted something active! That’s exactly what a kitten wants when it runs round after its own tail—and there’s about as much sense in it. Upon my word, there is!”
“You’re very hard on him, uncle Robert. And I don’t think you’re quite reasonable. It was a good deal the old Admiral’s fault—”
“I’m not examining the cause, I’m going over the facts,” said old Lauderdale, impatiently. “I tried him, and I very soon got to the end of him. He meant to do nothing. It was quite clear from the first. If he’d been a starving relation it would have been different. I should have made him work whether he liked it or not. As it was, I gave it up as a bad job. He wants to be idle, and he has the means to be idle if he’s willing to live on his mother. She has ten thousand dollars a year, and a house of her own, and they can live very well on that—just as well as they want to. When his mother dies that’s what Jack will have, and if he chooses to marry on it—”
“You seem to forget that he’s married already—”
“By Jove! I did! But it doesn’t change things in the least. My position is just the same as it was before. With ten thousand a year Katharine Ralston couldn’t support a family—”
“Indeed, I could! I’m Katharine Ralston, and I should be—”