fee, but paid the judgment against his client out of his own pocket and
went home with a wound to his foolish, sensitive pride for which there
was no quick cure. A little later, he went to the mountains, when those
wonderful hills first began to give up their wealth to the world; but
the pace was too swift, competition was too undignified and greedy, and
business was won on too low a plane. After a year or two of rough life,
which helped him more than he knew, until long afterward, he went home.
Politics he had not yet tried, and politics he was now persuaded to try.
He made a brilliant canvass, but another element than oratory had crept
in as a new factor in political success. His opponent, Wharton, the
wretched little lawyer who had bested him once before, bested him now,
and the weight of the last straw fell crushingly. It was no use. The
little touch of magic that makes success seemed to have been denied him
at birth, and, therefore, deterioration began to set in--the
deterioration that comes from idleness, from energy that gets the wrong
vent, from strong passions that a definite purpose would have kept
under control--and the worse elements of a nature that, at the bottom,
was true and fine, slowly began to take possession of him as weeds will
take possession of an abandoned field.

But even then nobody took him as seriously as he took himself. So that
while he fell just short, in his own eyes, of everything that was worth
while; of doing something and being something worth while; believing
something that made the next world worth while; or gaining the love of a
woman that would have made this life worth while--in the eyes of his own
people he was merely sowing his wild oats after the fashion of his race,
and would settle down, after the same fashion, by and by--that was the
indulgent summary of his career thus far. He had been a brilliant
student in the old university and, in a desultory way, he was yet. He
had worried his professor of metaphysics by puzzling questions and keen