I have given you the
best schooling a boy can have, and you have not shown the least
appreciation of your advantages. I do not enjoy saying this, Hugh, but in
spite of all my efforts and of those of your mother, you have remained
undeveloped and irresponsible. My hope, as you know, was to have made you
a professional man, a lawyer, and to take you into my office. My father
and grandfather were professional men before me. But you are wholly
lacking in ambition."

And I had burned with it all my life!

"I have ambition," I cried, the tears forcing themselves to my eyes.

"Ambition--for what, my son?"

I hesitated. How could I tell him that my longings to do something, to be
somebody in the world were never more keen than at that moment? Matthew
Arnold had not then written his definition of God as the stream of
tendency by which we fulfil the laws of our being; and my father, at any
rate, would not have acquiesced in the definition. Dimly but passionately
I felt then, as I had always felt, that I had a mission to perform, a
service to do which ultimately would be revealed to me. But the
hopelessness of explaining this took on, now, the proportions of a
tragedy. And I could only gaze at him.

"What kind of ambition, Hugh?" he repeated sadly.

"I--I have sometimes thought I could write, sir, if I had a chance. I
like it better than anything else. I--I have tried it. And if I could
only go to college--"

"Literature!" There was in his voice a scandalized note.

"Why not, father?" I asked weakly.

And now it was he who, for the first time, seemed to be at a loss to
express himself. He turned in his chair, and with a sweep of the hand
indicated the long rows of musty-backed volumes. "Here," he said, "you
have had at your disposal as well-assorted a small library as the city
contains, and you have not availed yourself of it. Yet you talk to me of
literature as a profession. I am afraid, Hugh, that this is merely
another indication of your desire to shun hard work, and I must tell you
frankly that I fail to see in you the least qualification for such a
career. You have not even inherited my taste for books. I venture to say,
for instance, that you have never even read a paragraph of Plutarch, and
yet when I was your age I was completely familiar with the Lives. You
will not read Scott or Dickens."

The impeachment was not to be denied, for the classics were hateful to
me. Naturally I was afraid to make such a damning