I told him, besides, that however poor my chances were
in sculpture, I was convinced they were yet worse in
business, for which I equally lacked taste and
aptitude. But upon this head he was my father over
again; assured me that I spoke in ignorance; that any
intelligent and cultured person was bound to succeed;
that I must, besides, have inherited some of my
father's fitness; and, at any rate, that I had been
regularly trained for that career in the commercial
college.
"Pinkerton," I said, "can't you understand that, as
long as I was there, I never took the smallest interest
in any stricken thing? The whole affair was poison to
me."
"It's not possible," he would cry; "it can't be; you
couldn't live in the midst of it and not feel the
charm; with all your poetry of soul you couldn't help!
Loudon," he would go on, "you drive me crazy. You
expect a man to be all broken up about the sunset, and
not to care a dime for a place where fortunes are
fought for and made and lost all day; or for a career
that consists in studying up life till you have it at
your finger-ends, spying out every cranny where you can
get your hand in and a dollar out, and standing there
in the midst--one foot on bankruptcy, the other on a
borrowed dollar, and the whole thing spinning round you
like a mill--raking in the stamps, in spite of fate and
fortune.
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