"You seem to be downhearted; what's the matter?"
"Mister Whimple lost a case to-day."
"Well, lots of lawyers do that. In baseball, or law, or anything else, William, you've got to lose sometimes. Remember the old saying, 'It's better to have tried to buck the line, and failed, than never to have tried at all.'"
"But Mister Whimple's just getting a good start, and he can't afford to lose cases. It gives him a bad steer with people that's looking for lawyers in the winning column!"
CHAPTER XIX
The plans that men make in the belief that the knowledge and wisdom of the adult mind knows what is best for youth are many and of small account. For the youthful mind sees easily through the most of them, intuitively perhaps, and not by methods of reasoning, and decides for itself whether it shall accept or reject them. And office boys constitute a particularly abnormal department—if such it may be termed—of the youthful mind. This is merely a roundabout way of preparing the readers, if any, of this veracious chronicle with the fact that William had not, as Tommy Watson supposed, "walked into" the plan whereby he was to receive an additional hour of tuition from that prince of tutors, "Chuck" Epstein. If this was a history, the truth might be coloured with the glamour of romance at times. But, as Tommy Watson himself was wont to say, "Facts are real, facts are earnest, facts are very stubborn things, facts are facts where'er you find 'em, facts are what gives truth its wings." Therefore, it is here set down in black and white that William himself engineered that additional hour, and the wise men who thought they had initiated it patted themselves on the back because it was a success.
William, of a truth, was beginning to find himself by finding others out. He had discovered, and it was a bitter shock to William, that Lucien Torrance, for whom his feelings were tinctured by good-natured tolerance, was making good use of his spare time around the office. Lucien had no "vaulting ambition:" he would hardly have understood the meaning of the words. He wanted to improve his position though, and he practised consistently on the typewriter, he took lessons in shorthand, and was beginning to master the intricacies of bookkeeping, taking his lessons therein at a night school. His desk was always neat and clean, and the clerical work that Simmons, the architect, was beginning to trust him with was well done.
William's desk always looked to be over-crowded, and was never neat. Periodically, the lad had a cleaning-up day, but he never seemed to make much headway in getting rid of the assorted mass of newspaper and magazine clippings that he accumulated with avidity. It was an amazing collection, and every bit of reading in it, and every picture, referred to comedians; always comedians.
Lucien Torrance tackled him about it one day. "Why don't you throw all that truck away?" he said; "it's an awful lot of rubbish."