ent on, by way of implanting in him
sensible and serious views of life, to point out that the right to
spend money had to be acquired by effort expended.

Morgan had made up his mind at a very boyish age that he was destined
to become an immortal bard; the conceptions he had then formed had
remained with him in all their boyish freshness. They were pure
conceptions, detached from the realities, of which he then knew
nothing. Poetry was a great and glorious thing, and when he first
decided that his whole life could be devoted to nothing nobler, he had
selected it away from the actual material circumstances from which
existence cannot be extricated.

But in this first talk with his father he had already been brought
into collision with these sordid complications. Archibald's
well-intentioned scorn had inflicted a wound that pained still after
the lapse of years. Moreover, by raising financial questions, he had
unwittingly poured poison into that wound. Morgan, however, refused to
have his eyes opened and clung desperately to his detached conception
of poetry and the poet's life.

The thought of his being destined for business terrified the lad. He
felt he could never live in the atmosphere of an office. He was born
to sing, to charm, to enchant. What had he to do with money? He must
argue with his father and convince him. And he effectually did succeed
in making him understand he was serious. The banker was upset, and
Morgan, carried along by the freshness and purity of his enthusiasm,
made an altogether wrong judgment of the position. For the first
opposition and the first clash of wills represented a bigger fact to
Morgan than it did to the father, who, not entirely understanding the
force of the ferment in his son's mind, as yet took it for granted
that time was only needed to eradicate this strange, startling
madness. He therefore pressed Morgan to proceed at once to the
University, in the belief he would take a more sensible view of things
when he was a few years older. But Morgan refused. He held to his
ambition with frenzied persistence, and he had felt the bitterness of
dependence. He determined, therefore, to try his wings at once,
remembering that money _was_ attached to success, and, in the optimism
of enthusiasm, forming impossible hopes of supporting himself before
long.

Archibald Druce did not mind his being apparently idle for awhile,
and, by a sort of common understanding, the subject was not touched