“Uncle, I am trying to learn this confounded business. There is no use in getting angry with me—it isn’t my fault if I don’t succeed. Ask Aunt Gertrude whether I’ve worked hard or not. But I don’t want to be a burden to you—you’ve been very kind, and I should hate to feel that you think I’m simply sponging on you. If you aren’t satisfied with me, please just say so.”
“Oh, come now, my boy, there’s nothing to take offense about,” said Mr. Lambert hastily, changing his tactics immediately. “It merely occurred to me that you were not satisfied, and to urge you, if that is the case, to speak out frankly.”
Paul hesitated. During the last three or four weeks he had been repeatedly on the point of coming to an understanding with his uncle, and had put it off, certain that it would not be an “understanding” at all, but simply a good old-fashioned row. There was not one chance in a hundred that Mr. Lambert could be made to understand his ideas or sympathize with them in the least, and Paul, financially, as well as in other ways, was too helpless to struggle just then. At the same time, it had occurred to him, that from one point of view, he was not acting fairly. He was ashamed of accepting Mr. Lambert’s hospitality when, plainly, it was extended to him only on the condition that he conformed with Mr. Lambert’s wishes, and when he had not the slightest intention of fulfilling his uncle’s desires.
“It’s a pretty shabby trick, and cowardly too, to live here until I get ready to do what I want, when all of them are depending on my being a fixture. It would be better to put the whole business up to uncle, and stand my ground openly. Then, if he wants to kick me out, he can.”
Paul reached this decision in the pause that followed Mr. Lambert’s last remark, during which his uncle eyed him narrowly.
“I see that you are deliberating,” said Mr. Lambert, coldly. “Again let me urge you to be frank.”
“Very well, sir. I will!” declared Paul impetuously. “I’ll be telling you very little more than I told you when I first came. I can never learn to be a baker. You can see that for yourself. And what’s more, it isn’t as if I hadn’t tried. I don’t want charity, and I thought that if for a while I could be of some help to Aunt Gertrude, it might be one way of paying for my board and lodging. And that’s why—whatever you may think—I’ve done my best to learn how to make all this stuff. But it’s no use. I never can be a baker, and I don’t want to be a baker!”
“Ah!” said Mr. Lambert, leaning back in his chair. “I thought that was how the land lay.” He was silent for a moment, and then, carefully plucking a thread from the buttonhole in his lapel, he inquired.
“And what do you want to be?”
“I want to be—” (“Here’s where the music starts,” thought Paul), “I want to be a painter.”