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Literary Friends and Acquaintance; a Personal Retrospect of American Authorship by William Dean Howells
page 66 of 206 (32%)
which I had the belief I could very well become, with advantage to myself
if not to the magazine. He seemed to think so too; he said that if the
place had not just been filled, I should certainly have had it; and it
was to his recollection of this prompt ambition of mine that I suppose I
may have owed my succession to a like vacancy some four years later. He
was charmingly kind; he entered with the sweetest interest into the story
of my economic life, which had been full of changes and chances already.
But when I said very seriously that now I was tired of these fortuities,
and would like to be settled in something, he asked, with dancing eyes,

"Why, how old are you?"

"I am twenty-three," I answered, and then the laughing fit took him
again.

"Well," he said, "you begin young, out there!"

In my heart I did not think that twenty-three was so very young, but
perhaps it was; and if any one were to say that I had been portraying
here a youth whose aims were certainly beyond his achievements, who was
morbidly sensitive, and if not conceited was intolerably conscious, who
had met with incredible kindness, and had suffered no more than was good
for him, though he might not have merited his pain any more than his joy,
I do not know that I should gainsay him, for I am not at all sure that I
was not just that kind of youth when I paid my first visit to New
England.




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