“A bit of a gamble if you only stake on worldly success,” said Paton quietly.
Image nodded emphatically, and looked curiously from one young man to the other.
“It isn’t such a gamble. I believe most firmly that you can ensure success provided that you have certain abilities and a fair constitution. You hear a lot of people blaming Fate for their non-success in life. How many of them have really striven whole-heartedly to get what they want? The road to success is a sort of obstacle race, and you can’t afford, while you are surmounting the obstacles, to either look to the right or the left or even behind you, to see who is possibly going to overtake you. Success isn’t a chance; it’s a certainty if you concentrate.” Gilbert had a very decisive manner, which was worth its weight in gold to him in the courts.
For a moment there was silence as he ceased speaking.
“Yes, but my dear boy,” said Image at length, “what is success?”
“Making money, I suppose,” said Jack Iverson, watching Richards refill his glass. He was glad that he did not do any of these strenuous things. He had a secret awe and lazy admiration of Gilbert.
“No,” said his host, “you generally make money if you are successful—it follows as the night the day—but I should say that very few of the world’s successful men have worked for the sake of money.”
“Well, how do you define it? Notoriety, fame, the applause of undiscriminating men who shout with the crowd, paragraphs in the halfpenny papers side-by-side with an account of the latest high kick of a popular actress, a long obituary notice to be followed by a badly-written book of biography by one of the family which nobody reads—is that worth struggling for?” Paton put the question quietly, his voice a trifle colourless after Gilbert’s.
“You are not ambitious,” retorted Gilbert. “You never were. You have always let other fellows walk over you, chaps with half your brains. You dream your time away.”
“No, excuse me, I don’t dream. I hate excessively to hear myself classed with those vague, anæmic brains that wander like will-o’-the-wisps over the world. You think I wasted my time at Oxford because I did not take any degree. I don’t. I taught myself how to think. I refused to cram my brains with facts most of which would be of little use to me in after-life, or to my neighbour. I tried to leave a little room for the imagination. Oxford appealed to my imagination, and I think I have brought something away from her that will be a precious possession all my life. You came away with an enormous capacity for assimilating knowledge, with a well-trained memory and a habit of pigeonholing everything and everybody. Most useful to you in your profession, my dear fellow, but it did not appeal to me as worth working for.”