"No—none that I know of. But the life is so monotonous, Fred. You do what you love to do. I mark boxes all day till lunch-time, then I roll them out on the sidewalk and make out dray tickets till I come home. I've been doing that all winter; I expect to be doing it for years. That don't get me anywhere, does it? I hate the life more and more every day."
(Was our hero's old love of change again asserting itself, or was it only the pinching of that Chinese shoe which his mother in her anxiety had slipped on his unresisting foot, and which he was still wearing to please her? Or was it the upper pressure of some inherent talent—some gift of his ancestors that would not down at his own bidding or that of his mother or anybody else's?)
"Somebody's got to do it, Ollie, and you are the last man hired," remarked Fred, quietly. "What would you like to do?"
Oliver shifted himself in the crowded chair until he could look into his room-mate's eyes.
"Fred, old man," he answered, his voice choking, "I haven't said a word to you about it all the time I've been here, for I don't like to talk about a thing that hurts me, and so I've kept it to myself. Now I'll tell you the truth just as it is. I don't want Mr. Slade's work nor anybody else's work. I don't like business and never will. I want to paint, and I'll never be happy until I do. That's it, fair and square."
"Well, quit Slade, then, and come with me."
"I would if it wasn't for mother. I promised her I would see this through, and I will." As he spoke the overdue mortgage and his mother's efforts to keep the interest paid passed in review before him.
Fred caught his breath. It astonished him, independent young Northerner as he was, to hear a full-grown man confess that his mother's' apron-strings still held him up, but he made no comment.
"Why not try both?" he cried. "There's a place in the school alongside of me—we'll work together nights. It won't interfere with what you do downtown. You'll get a good start, and when you have a day off in the summer you can do some out-door work. Waller has told me a dozen times that you draw better than he did when he commenced. Come along with me."
This conversation, with the other incidents of the day, or rather that part of it which had reference to the Academy, was duly set forth in his next letter to his mother—not as an argument to gain her consent to his studying with Fred, for he knew it was the last thing she would agree to—but because it was his habit to tell her everything. It would show her, too, how good a fellow Fred was and what an interest he took in his welfare. Her answer, three days later, sent him bounding upstairs and into their room like a whirlwind.