“‘I am the captain of my soul,’” he quoted sententiously.
“Yes, you are,” she admitted, after one swift glance that took in the dogged, flinty quality of him. “But most of us aren’t. Take Dad. He’s strong, and he’s four-square. But he wouldn’t have gone as far as he did with these tramps if he hadn’t got carried away. Well, don’t you think maybe this boy is a victim of ‘the bludgeonings of chance’? He looked like it to me.”
“We make ourselves,” he insisted. “If the things we buck up against break us, it’s because we’re weak.”
“Yes, but—” Betty’s protest died away. She was not convinced, and she made another start. “It seems to me that when I read the new novelists—Wells, Galsworthy, or Bennett, say—one of the things I get out of them is that we are modified by our environment, not only changed by it, but sometimes made the prey of it and destroyed by it.”
“Depends on how solid on our feet we are,” answered the engineer. “That’s the plea of the agitator, I know. He’s always wanting to do impossible things by law or by a social upheaval. There’s nothing to it. A man succeeds if he’s strong. He fails if he’s weak.”
This creed of the individualist was sometimes Betty’s own, but to-night she was not ready to accept it. “That would be all very well if we all started equal. But we don’t. What about a man who develops tuberculosis, say, just when he is getting going? He’s weak, but it’s no fault of his.”
“It may or may not be. Anyhow, it’s his misfortune. You can’t make the world over because he’s come a cropper. Take this young tramp of yours. I’d like to try him out and show you whether there’s anything to him. I’d put him on the work and let him find his level. Chances are he’d drift back to the road inside of a week. When a man’s down-and-out, it isn’t because he doesn’t get a chance, but because of some weakness in himself.”
Betty knew that in the case of many this was true. For a year or more she had been an employer of labor herself. One of the things that had impressed her among the young fellows who worked for her was that they did find their level. The unskilled, shiftless, and less reliable were dropped when work became slack. The intelligent and energetic won promotion for themselves.
But she did not believe that it was by any means a universal truth. Men were not machines, after all. They were human beings. However, she dropped the subject.
“He’s gone, so you won’t have a chance to prove your case,” she said. “Tell me about the work. How is it going?”