I was thoroughly over being a senior. You will note that I do not say
he changed his opinion. Modify is the word.

His original estimate of me, as a freshman, of course,--was uttered
when I, at the age of eighteen, picked out my walk in life, so to
speak. After considering everything, I decided to be a literary man.
A novelist or a playwright, I hadn't much of a choice between the two,
or perhaps a journalist. Being a journalist, of course, was preliminary;
a sort of makeshift. At any rate, I was going to be a writer. My Uncle
Rilas, a hard-headed customer who had read Scott as a boy and the Wall
Street news as a man,--without being misled by either,--was scornful.
He said that I would outgrow it, there was some consolation in that.
He even admitted that when he was seventeen he wanted to be an actor.
There you are, said he! I declared there was a great difference between
being an actor and being a writer. Only handsome men can be actors,
while I--well, by nature I was doomed to be nothing more engaging than
a novelist, who doesn't have to spoil an illusion by showing himself
in public.

Besides, I argued, novelists make a great deal of money, and playwrights
too, for that matter. He said in reply that an ordinarily vigorous
washerwoman could make more money than the average novelist, and she
always had a stocking without a hole to keep it in, which was more to
the point.

Now that I come to think of it, it _was_ Uncle Rilas who oracularly
prejudged me, and not Uncle John, who was by way of being a sort of
literary chap himself and therefore lamentably unqualified to guide
me in any course whatsoever, especially as he had all he could do to
keep his own wolf at bay without encouraging mine, and who, besides