s, the best was
fame--the fame that means success.

Thus, from the very beginning of Sydney's life, his father sedulously
cultivated ambition in his soul, and taught him that failure meant
disgrace. The spur that he applied to the boy acted with equal force on
the girl, but with different results. For with ambition the rector sowed
the seeds of a deadly egotism, and it found a favorable soil--at least
in Sydney's heart. That the boy should strive for himself and his own
glory--that was the lesson the rector taught him; and he ought not to
have been surprised when, in later years, his son's absorption in self
gave him such bitter pain.

Lettice, with her ambition curbed by love and pity, accepted the
discipline of patience and self-sacrifice, set before her by the
selfishness of other people; but Sydney gave free rein to his ambition
and his pride. He could not make shift to content himself, as his father
had done, with academic distinction alone. He wanted to be a leader of
men, to take a foremost place in the world of men. He sometimes told
himself that his father had equipped him to the very best of his power
for the battle of life, and he was grateful to him for his care; but he
did not think very much about the sacrifices made for him by others. As
a matter of fact, he thought himself worth them all. And for the prize
he desired, he bartered away much that makes the completer man: for he
extinguished many generous instincts and noble possibilities, and
thought himself the gainer by their loss.

In Lettice, the love of fame was also strong, but in a modified form.
Her tastes were more literary than those of Sydney, but success was as
sweet to her as to him. The zest with which she worked was also in part
due to the rector's teaching; but, by the strange workings-out of
influence and tendency, it had chanced that the rector's carelessness
and neglect had been the factors that disciplined a nature both strong
and sweet into forgetfulness of self and absorption in work rather than
its rewards.

But already Nature had begun with Sydney Campion her grand process of
amelioration, which she applies (when we let her have her way) to all
men and women, most systematically to those who need it most, securing
an entrance to their souls by their very vices and weaknesses, and
invariably supplying the human instrument or the effective circumstances
which are best calculated to work her purpose. Such beneficent work of
Nature