"Look here! You suggest I should take the noblest course, as if I had never thought of that before. I'm not lower in the scale of creation than you, and I've had the same bringing up. I've never done anything great, but I've tried not to do the other thing. I felt I should be a sneak when I left school if I disappointed father for the sake of being something fine, and I feel I should be a sneak now if I turned—"
"You acted like the dear fellow I always knew you were in the first instance, but why is it the same now? It's not for his sake, surely, for, for all you know, from where he is now, the sight of you going on with that work may not give him pleasure, but pain."
"No; I went into it to please him, but now he's gone that's ended."
"Then it's not the same now. Why do you say you'd feel like a sneak if you changed? There is, I think, no goddess or patron saint of the trade, who would be personally offended at your desertion."
"You don't understand at all. I'm sick—just sick, of seeing men trying to find something grand enough to do, instead of trying to do the first thing they can grandly."
"I haven't noticed that men are so set on rising."
"No, not always; but when they're not ambitious enough to get something fine to do, they're not ambitious enough to do what they do well, unless it's for the sake of money. Look at the fellows that went to school with us, half of them shopkeepers' sons. How many of them went in with their fathers? Just those who were mean enough to care for nothing but money-making, and those who were too dull to do anything else."
"The education they got was good enough to give them a taste for higher callings."
"Yes"—with a sneer—"and how the masters gloried over such brilliant examples as yourself, who felt themselves 'called higher,' so to speak! You had left school by the time I came to it, but I had your shining tracks pointed out to me all along the way, and old Thompson told me that Wolsey's father was 'in the same line as my papa,' and he instructed me about Kirke White's career; and I, greedy little pig that I was, sucked it all in till I sickened. I've never been able to feed on any of that food since."
In a moment the other continued, "Well, in spite of the fact that our own father was too true and simple ever to be anything but a gentleman, it remains true that the choice of this trade and others on a level with it—"