a branch of the matter that I must for the moment brush aside.
For it would have been meanwhile odd enough to hold us in arrest a
moment--that quality of our situation that could suffer such elements as
those I have glanced at to take so considerably the place of education
as more usually and conventionally understood, and by that
understanding more earnestly mapped out; a deficiency, in the whole
thing, that I fail at all consistently to deplore, however--struck as I
am with the rare fashion after which, in any small victim of life, the
inward perversity may work.

It works by converting to its uses things vain and unintended, to the
great discomposure of their prepared opposites, which it by the same
stroke so often reduces to naught; with the result indeed that one may
most of all see it--so at least have I quite exclusively seen it, the
little life out for its chance--as proceeding by the inveterate process
of conversion. As I reconsider both my own and my brother's early
start--even his too, made under stronger propulsions--it is quite for me
as if the authors of our being and guardians of our youth had virtually
said to us but one thing, directed our course but by one word, though
constantly repeated: Convert, convert, convert! With which I have not
even the sense of any needed appeal in us for further apprehension of
the particular precious metal our chemistry was to have in view. I taste
again in that pure air no ghost of a hint, for instance, that the
precious metal was the refined gold of "success"--a reward of effort for
which I remember to have heard at home no good word, nor any sort of
word, ever faintly breathed. It was a case of the presumption that we
should hear words enough abundantly elsewhere; so that any dignity the
idea might claim was in the first place not worth insisting on, and in
the second might well be overstated. We were to convert and convert,
success--in the sense that was in the general air--or no success; and
simply everything that should happen to us, every contact, every
impression and every experience we should know, were to form our soluble
stuff; with only ourselves to thank should we remain unaware, by the
time our perceptions were decently developed, of the substance finally
projected and most desirable. That substance might be just consummately
Virtue, as a social grace and value--and as a matter furthermore on
which pretexts for ambiguity of view and of measure were as little