“And writes birthday odes ‘To My Infant Daughter’ for the ‘Home Journal,’” continued Clay.
“No, no,” said the victim of this banter, shaking his head solemnly. “I shall give no hostages to Fortune. I mean to live snug and carry as little sail as possible: to leave only the narrowest margin out for Fate to tread on. The man who has the fewest exposed points leads, on the whole, the happiest life. How can a man enjoy himself freely when a piece of defective plumbing, the bursting of a toy pistol, the carelessness of a nurse, may plunge him into a life-long sorrow? I don’t say it’s a very noble life that I propose to myself, but it’s a safe one. I’m too nervous and anxious to stand the responsibilities of matrimony.”
“If you can’t stand responsibility,” said Doddridge, “I don’t see why you choose the law for a profession. You don’t seem to me cut out for a lawyer anyway. I always thought you meant to be some kind of a literary chap.”
“Yes,” said Berkeley, “why don’t you go for a snug berth under the government, or study for a tutorship here? That’s the life that would suit you, old man.”
“Not at all,” answered Armstrong; “I have a horror of any salaried position, or of any position where a man is obliged to conform his habits and opinions to other people’s. It is the worst sort of dependence. Now a lawyer in successful practice, and especially if he is a bachelor, is about as independent as a man can be. His relations with his clients are merely professional, and what he does or thinks privately is nobody’s business.”
“If you are going to be a mere lawyer,” asked Clay, “what becomes of your education and your intellectual satisfactions, etc.?”
“A man can get his best intellectual satisfactions out of the work of his profession,” answered Armstrong. “Besides, as to that, there’s time enough. Fifteen years of solid work will enable one to put by a fair competence, if he lives carefully and has no one but himself to support; and then he will be free to take up a hobby. Oh, I shall cultivate a hobby or two after awhile. It keeps the mind healthy to have some interest of the kind outside of one’s business. I may take to book-collecting or numismatics or raising orchids. Perhaps I may become an authority on ancient armor; time enough for that by and by. And then I can cut over to Europe every summer if I like, and no one to interfere with my down-sittings or my up-risings, my goings-out or my comings-in. Do you know,” he went on, after a pause, “how I always look to myself in the glass of the future? I figure myself like old Tulkinghorn, in ‘Bleak House,’—going down into his reverberating vaults for a bottle of choice vintage, after the work of the day, and then sitting quietly in the twilight in his dusky, old-fashioned law chambers, sipping his wine while the room fills with the fragrance of southern grapes. The gay old silver-top!”
There was silence for a few minutes after Armstrong had finished his declaration. It was broken by Berkeley, who had risen, and was walking up and down in front of the fountain with his hands thrust into his pockets.
“You couldn’t lead that sort of life if you tried,” he said; “you aren’t built for it.”