“Haven’t you changed your ideal of life lately?” asked Clay, a little scornfully.
“Perhaps I have,” said Armstrong, “perhaps I’ve had to.”
“What is your ideal of life?” I inquired.
“Well, I’ll tell you,” he answered, draining his coffee-cup solemnly, and putting it down with the manner of a man who has made up his mind. The rest of us arranged ourselves in attitudes of attention. “My ideal is independence,” began Armstrong. “I want to live my own life; and as the first condition of independence is money, I’m going for money. Culture and taste, and all that, are well enough when a man can afford it, but for a poor man it means just so many additional wants which he can’t gratify. My father is an educated man; a country minister with a small salary and a large family; and his education, instead of being a blessing, has been an actual curse to him. He has pined for all sorts of things which he couldn’t have—books, engravings, foreign travel, leisure for study, nice people and nice things about him. I’ve made up my mind that, whatever else I may be, I won’t be poor, and I won’t be a minister, and I won’t have a wife and brats hanging to me. I tell you that, next to ill health, poverty is the worst thing that can happen to a man. All the sentimental grievances that are represented in novels and poetry as the deepest of human afflictions,—disappointed ambitions, death of friends, loss of faith, estrangements, having your girl go back on you,—they don’t signify very long if a man has sound health and a full purse. The ministers and novel writers and fellows that preach the sentimental view of life don’t believe it themselves. It’s a kind of professional or literary quackery with them. Just let them feel the pinch of poverty, and then offer them a higher salary or a chance to make a little ‘sordid gain’ in some way, and see how quick they’ll accept the call to ‘a higher sphere of usefulness.’ Berk, hand over a match, will you; this cigar has gone out.”
“Loud cries of ‘We will—we will’!” said Berkeley. “But can it be? Has the poick turned cynic, and the sickly sentimentalist become a materialist and a misogynist?”
(Armstrong was our class poet, and had worried the official muse on Presentation Day to the utterance of some four hundred lines filled with allusions to Alma Mater, Friendship’s Altar, the Elms of Yale, etc. His piece on that occasion had been “pronounced, by a well-known literary gentleman who was present, equal to the finest productions of our own Willis.”)
“I’ll bet the cigars,” said Doddridge, “that Armstrong marries the first girl he sees in New York.”
“Yes,” said Clay, “his boarding-house keeper’s daughter.”
“And has a dozen children before he is forty,” added Berkeley; “a dozen kids, and all of them girls. Charley is sure to be a begetter of wenches.”