It did not take long for Georgie to arrive at the facts in Bob's case. Confidence begets confidence; and in another day or two, won by her bright sympathy, he gradually made a clean breast of his troubles. Somehow they did not seem so great after they were told. Georgie's sympathy was not of a weakening sort, and her questions and comments seemed to clear things to his mind, and set them in right relations to each other.
"I don't think that I pity you much," she told him one day. "Your mother and the girls, yes, because they are women and not used to it, and it always is harder for girls—"
"See here, you're a girl yourself," put in Bob.
"No—I'm a business person. Don't interrupt. What I was going to say was, that I think it's lovely for a young man to have to work! We are all lazy by nature; we need to be shaken up and compelled to do our best. You will be ten times as much of a person in the end as if you had always had your own way."
"Do you really think that? But what's the use of talking? I may stick where I am for years, and never do more than just make a living."
"I wouldn't!" said Georgie, throwing back her pretty head with an air of decision. "I should scorn to 'stick' if I were a man! And I don't believe you will either. If you once go into it heartily and put your will into it, you're sure to succeed. I always considered you clever, you know. You'll go up—up—as sure as, as sure as dust,—that's the thing of all the world that's most certain to rise, I think."
"'Overmastered with a clod of valiant marl,'" muttered Robert below his breath; then aloud, "Well, if that's the view you take of it, I'll do my best to prove you right. It's worth a good deal to know that there is somebody who expects something of me."
"I expect everything of you," said Georgie confidently. And Bob went back to his post at the end of the fortnight infinitely cheered and heartened.
"Bless her brave little heart!" he said to himself. "I won't disappoint her if I can help it; or, if I must, I'll know the reason why."
It is curious, and perhaps a little humiliating, to realize how much our lives are affected by what may be called accident. A touch here or there, a little pull up or down to set us going, often determines the direction in which we go, and direction means all. Robert Curtis in after times always dated the beginning of his fortunes from the day when he walked into his uncle's library and found Georgie Talcott cataloguing books.