"Howard, you remind me of a cart-horse, treading on his trace chains. You remind me—I don't know what you remind me of."
"Of a cart-horse, you said."
Again Mrs. Elbridge admonished him not to irritate the old fellow, but did it so laughingly that he accepted it more as a spur than as a restraint; and Florence pulled at his sleeve, but more in connivance than in reproof. Agnes laughed outright. She declared that it was better than a circus. The old man turned his eyes upon her, giving her a long and steady gaze, and she whispered to Florence that even the pin-feathers of his dignity had begun to rise. "Better than a circus," he replied. "I don't see any similarity except that we have a clown." He winked at Mrs. Elbridge, as if he expected her to rejoice in what he believed to be a victory over the young man. Marriage may cripple a man's opportunities—in some respects it may restrict his range of vision, but it renders his near view much more nearly exact. Having never known the repressions of the married state—ignorant of the intellectual clearing-house of matrimony—William was blind to many things, and particularly to the fact that the mother hated him at that moment, though she smiled when he winked at her.
"Not much like modern circuses," Howard admitted. "They have a whole group of clowns, while we have but two, at most."
"Howard," said the old fellow, "do you mean to call me a clown?"
"Not a good one, Uncle William."
"Not a good one. Well, sir, I want to say that I'd make a deuced sight better one than you." When emphasis was put upon the word, it meant, with Uncle William, not the opprobrious, but the commendable. During his boyhood, to be a clown was to be greater than a judge, greater, if possible, than the driver of a stage-coach. In the old day, it was a compliment to tell a boy that he would make a good clown.
"I don't doubt you'd make a good clown, Uncle Billy. Aspiration is, within itself, a sort of fitness."
"What do you mean by that?"
"There is a certain genius in mere ambition," Howard went on. "If we yearn—and yearn, only, we come nearer to an achievement than those who don't yearn. Who knows that genius is not desire—just desire, and nothing more. I know a man over at St. Jo that can eat more cherries than any man in Michigan, not because he is larger than any of the rest, but because he has a broader appetite for cherries—more yearning."