too undignified and greedy, and
business was won on too low a plane. After a year or two of rough life,
which helped him more than he knew, until long afterward, he went home.
Politics he had not yet tried, and politics he was now persuaded to try.
He made a brilliant canvass, but another element than oratory had crept
in as a new factor in political success. His opponent, Wharton, the
wretched little lawyer who had bested him once before, bested him now,
and the weight of the last straw fell crushingly. It was no use. The
little touch of magic that makes success seemed to have been denied him
at birth, and, therefore, deterioration began to set in--the
deterioration that comes from idleness, from energy that gets the wrong
vent, from strong passions that a definite purpose would have kept
under control--and the worse elements of a nature that, at the bottom,
was true and fine, slowly began to take possession of him as weeds will
take possession of an abandoned field.

But even then nobody took him as seriously as he took himself. So that
while he fell just short, in his own eyes, of everything that was worth
while; of doing something and being something worth while; believing
something that made the next world worth while; or gaining the love of a
woman that would have made this life worth while--in the eyes of his own
people he was merely sowing his wild oats after the fashion of his race,
and would settle down, after the same fashion, by and by--that was the
indulgent summary of his career thus far. He had been a brilliant
student in the old university and, in a desultory way, he was yet. He
had worried his professor of metaphysics by puzzling questions and keen
argument until that philosopher was glad to mark him highest in his
class and let him go. He surprised the old lawyers when it came to a
discussion of the pure theory of law, and, on the one occasion when his
mother's pastor came to see him, he disturbed that good man no little,
and closed his lips against further censure of him in pulpit or in
private. So that all that was said against him by the pious was that he
did not go to church as he should; and by the thoughtful, that he was
making a shameful waste of the talents that the Almighty had showered so
freely down upon him. And so without suffering greatly in public
estimation, in spite of the fact that the ideals of Southern life were
changing fast, he passed into the old-young period that is the critical