ill say, perhaps, that there are all
degrees of half success short of absolute failure. But I say
no. In the career which I have chosen, to miss of
success--pronounced, unquestionable success--is to fail; and
I am not weak enough to hide from myself on which side of
the line I fall. The line is a very distinct one, after all.
The fact is, I took the wrong turning, and it is too late to
go back. I am a case of arrested development--a common
enough case. I might give plenty of excellent excuses to my
friends for not having accomplished what they expected me
to. But the world doesn't want apologies; it wants
performance.

"You will think this letter a most extraordinary outburst of
morbid vanity. But while I can afford to have you think me a
failure, I couldn't let you go on thinking me a fraud. That
must be my excuse for writing.

"Yours, as ever, E. CLAY."

This letter moved me deeply by its characteristic mingling of egotism
with elevation of feeling. As I held it open in my hand, and thought
over my classmates' fortunes, I was led to make a few reflections.
From the fact that Armstrong and Berkeley were leading lives that
squarely contradicted their announced ideas and intentions, it was an
obvious but not therefore a true inference that circumstance is
usually stronger than will. Say, rather, that the species of necessity
which consists in character and inborn tendency is stronger than any
resolution to run counter to it.

Both Armstrong and Berkeley, on our Commencement night, had spoken
from a sense of their own limitations, and in violent momentary
rebellion against them. But, in talking with them fifteen years later,
I could not discover that the lack of correspondence between their
ideal future and their actual present troubled them much. It is matter
of common note that it is impossible to make one man realize another's
experience; but it is often quite as hard to make him recover a past
stage of his own consciousness.

These, then, had bent to the force of chance or temperament. But
Clay had shaped his life according to his programme, and had the
result been happier? He who gets his wish often suffers a sharper
disappointment than he who loses it. "_So taeuscht uns also bald die
Hoffnung, bald das Gehoffte_," says the great pessimist, and Fate is
never more ironical than when she humors our whim. Doddri