University of Virginia Library

24. CHAPTER XXIV.
IN WHICH I LEARN SOMETHING ABOUT LIVINGSTON, MILLIE
BRADFORD AND MYSELF.

Since the old days of my boyhood, when Millie Bradford
and I had been intimate, confidential friends, she had never
received me with the cordiality that she exhibited on that
evening. I suppose she had listened to the account which her
father gave of my meeting with my old teacher, and of the
words which that meeting had inspired me to utter. I have no
doubt that my later history had pleased her, and done much to
awaken her old regard for me. Whatever the reasons may
have been, her grasp was hearty, her greeting cordial, and her
face was bright with welcome. I need not say that all this
thrilled me with pleasure, for I had inwardly determined to
earn her respect, and to take no steps for greater intimacy until
I had done so, even if it should lead me to abandon all hope
of being more to her than I had been.

It was easy that evening to win her to our old corner in the
drawing-room. Mrs. Bradford and Aunt Flick were ready
listeners to the conversation in progress between Mr. Bradford
and Mr. Bird, and we found ourselves at liberty to pursue our
own ways, without interruption or observation.

She questioned me with great interest about my school, and
as that was a subject which aroused all my enthusiasm, I talked
freely, and amused her with incidents of my daily work. She
could not but have seen that I was the victim of no vain regrets
concerning my loss of position and prospects, and that all my
energies and all my heart were in my new life. I saw that she
was gratified; and I was surprised to find that she was profoundly
interested in my success.

“By the way,” I said, after having dwelt too long upon a
topic that concerned myself mainly, “I wonder what has become
of Livingston? He was going to Europe, but I have not
heard a word from him since I parted with him months ago.
Do you know anything of him?”

“Have n't heard from him?” she said, with a kind of incredulous
gasp.

“Not a word.”

“Have n't you seen him?”

“Why, I have n't been out of the town.”

“No, but you have seen him here?”

“Not once.”

“You are sure?”

“Perfectly sure,” I responded, with a smile at her obstinate
unbelief.

“I don't understand it,” she said, looking away from me.

“Has he been here?” I inquired.

“Twice.”

I saw that she was not only puzzled, but deeply moved; and
I was conscious of a flush of mingled anger and indignation
sweeping over my own tell-tale face.

“Did he call on Henry when he was here?” I inquired.

“He did, on both occasions. Did not Henry tell you?”

“He did not.”

“That is strange, too,” she remarked.

“Miss Bradford,” I responded, “it is not strange at all. I
comprehend the whole matter. Henry knew Livingston better
than I did, and, doubting whether he would care to continue his
acquaintance with me after the change in my circumstances, had
not mentioned his calls to me. He knew that if I had met him,
I should speak of it; and as I did not speak of it, he concluded
that I had not met him, and so covered from me by his silence
the presence of my old friend in the city. Livingston did not
call upon me because, having nothing further in common with
me, he chose to ignore me altogether, and to count all that had
appeared like friendship between us for nothing. I was no

longer an heir to wealth. I was a worker for my own bread,
with my position to make by efforts whose issue was uncertain.
I could be his companion no further; I could be received at
his father's home no more. Every attention or courtesy he
might render me could he rendered no more except as a matter
of patronage. I can at least give him the credit for having
honesty and delicacy enough to shun me when he could meet
me no more on even terms.”

“Even terms!” exclaimed the girl, with a scorn in her manner
and voice which verged closely upon rage. “Is that a
style of manhood that one may apologize for?”

“Well,” I answered, “considering the fact that I was attracted
to him at first by the very motives which control him
now, I ought to be tolerant and charitable.”

“Yes, if that is true,” she responded; “but the matter is incredible
and incomprehensible.”

“It begins to seem so now, to me,” I replied, “but it did
not then. Our clique in college were all fools together, and
fancied that, because we had some worldly advantages not
shared by others, we were raised by them above the common
level. We took pride in circumstances that were entirely independent
of our manhood—circumstances that were gathered
around us by other hands. I am heartily ashamed of my old
weakness, and despise myself for it; but I can appreciate the
strength of the bonds that bind Livingston, and I forgive him
with all my heart.”

“I do not,” she responded. “The slight he has put upon you,
and his new friendship for Henry, disgust me more than I can
tell you. His conduct is mercenary and unmanly, and offends
me from the crown of my head to the sole of my foot.”

In the firm, strong passion of this true girl I saw my old self,
and realized the wretched slough from which I had been lifted.
I could not feel as she did, however, toward Livingston. After
the first flush of anger had subsided, I saw that, without some
radical change in him, he could not do otherwise than he had
done. Though manly in many of his characteristics, his scheme

of life was rotten at its foundation, in that it ignored manliness.
His standard of respectability was not natural, it was conventional;
and so long as he entertained no plan of life that was
based in manliness and manly work, his associations would be
controlled by the conventional standard to which he and those
around him bowed in constant loyalty.

After her frank expression of indignation, she seemed inclined
to drop the subject, and only a few more words were uttered
upon either side concerning it. I saw that she was troubled,
that she was angry, and that, during the moments devoted to
the conversation, she had arrived at some determination whose
nature and moment I could not guess. Sometimes she looked
at me: sometimes she looked away from me; and then her lips
were pressed together with a strange spasm of firmness, as if
some new resolution of her life were passing step by step to its
final issue.

I did guess afterward, and guessed aright. Livingston had
fascinated her, while she had so wholly gained his affection
and respect, and so won his admiration, that he was laying
siege to her heart by all the arts and appliances of which he was
so accustomed and accomplished a master. He was the first
man who had ever approached her as a lover. She had but just
escaped from the seclusion of her school-life, and this world of
love, of which she had only dreamed, had been opened to her
by the hands of a prince. He was handsome, accomplished in
the arts of society, vivacious and brilliant; and while he had
made comparatively little progress in winning her heart, he had
carried her fancy captive and excited her admiration, and only
needed more abundant opportunity to win her wholly to himself.

The revelation of the real character of the man, and of his
graceless dealing with me—the hollow-heartedness of his friendship,
and the transfer of his regard and courtesy from me to
Henry—offended all that was womanly within her. From the
moment when she comprehended his position—its meanness,
its injustice and unmanliness—she determined that he should be
forever shut out of her heart. She knew that her judgment

and conscience could never approve either his conduct or him
—that this one act could never be justified or apologized for.
The determination cost her a struggle which called into action
all the forces of her nature. I have been a thousand times
thankful that I did not know what was passing in her mind, for
I was thus saved from all temptation to attempt to turn her
heart against him, and turn it toward myself.

She wrote him a letter, as I subsequently learned, which was
intended to save him the mortification of visiting her again; but
he came again, armed with his old self-possession, determined
to win the prize upon which he had set his heart; and then he
went away, visiting neither Henry nor myself. Afterward he
went to Europe, and severed forever all his relations to the
lives of his Bradford acquaintances.

When Millie and I closed our conversation about Livingston,
I found her prepossessed and silent; and, as if by mutual impulse
and consent, we rose from our seats, and returned to the
other end of the drawing-room, where the remainder of the
family were gathered. There we found a conversation in progress
which I had no doubt had been suggested by my own
personality and position; and as it was very fruitfully suggestive
to me, and became a source of great encouragement to me,
I am sure my readers will be interested in it. We came within
hearing of the conversation, just as Mr. Bird was saying:—

“I never saw a man with anything of the real Shakespeare in
him—using him as our typical man—who could not be any sort
of a man that he chose to be. A genuinely practical man—a
man who can adapt himself to any sort of life—is invariably a
man of imagination. These young men who have the name of
being eminently practical—especially among women, who
usually consider all practical gifts to be those which relate to
making money and providing for a family—are the least
practical, in a wide sense, of anybody. They usually have a
strong bent toward a certain industrial or commercial pursuit,
and if they follow that bent, persistently, they succeed; but if
by any chance they are diverted from it, they fail irrevocably.

Now the man of imagination is he who apprehends and comprehends
the circumstances, proprieties and opportunities of
every life in which his lot may be cast, and adapts himself to
and employs them all. I have a fine chance to notice this in
my boys; and whenever I find one who has an imagination, I
see ten chances to make a man of him where one exists in
those less generously furnished.”

“Yet our geniuses,” responded Mr. Bradford, “have not
been noted for their skill in practical affairs, or for their power
to take care of themselves.”

“No,” said Mr. Bird, “because our geniuses, or what by
courtesy we call such, are one-sided men, who have a single
faculty developed in exceptionally large proportion. They are
practical men only in a single direction, like the man who has
a special gift for money-making, or affairs; and the latter is
just as truly a genius as the former, and both are necessarily
narrow men, and limited in their range of effort. This is not
at all the kind of man I mean; I allude to one who has fairly
symmetrical powers, with the faculty of imagination among
them. Without this latter, a man can never rise above the
capacity of a kind of human machine, working regularly or irregularly.
A man who cannot see the poetical side of his work,
can never achieve the highest excellence in it. The ideal must
always be apprehended before one can rise to that which is in
the highest possible sense practical. I have known boys who
were the despair of their humdrum fathers and mothers, because,
forsooth, they had the faculty of writing verses in their youth.
They were regarded by these parents with a kind of blind pride,
but with no expectation for them except poverty, unsteady purposes
and dependence. I have seen these same parents, many
times, depending in their old age upon their verse-writing boys
for comfort or luxury, while their practical brothers were tugging
for their daily bread, unable to help anybody but themselves
and their families.”

Mr. Bradford saw that I was intensely interested in this talk
of Mr. Bird, and said, with the hope of turning it more thoroughly

to my own practical advantage: “Well, what have you
to say to our young man here? He was so full of imagination
when a lad that we could hardly trust his eyes or his conscience.”

He said this with a laugh, but Mr. Bird turned toward me
with his old affectionate look, and replied: “I have never seen
the day since I first had him at my side, when I did not believe
that he had the making of a hundred different men in him. He
was always a good student when he chose to be. He would
have made, after a time, an ideal man of leisure. He is a
good teacher to-day. He has chosen to be a lawyer, and it
rests entirely with him to determine whether he will be an
eminent one. If he had chosen to be a preacher, or an author,
or a merchant, he would meet no insurmountable difficulty in
rising above mediocrity, in either profession. The faculty of
imagination, added to symmetrical intellectual powers, makes
it possible for him to be anything that he chooses to become.
By this faculty he will be able to see all the possibilities of any
profession, and all the possibilities of his powers with relation
to it.”

“As frankness of speech seems to be in order,” said Mr.
Bradford, “suppose you tell us whether you do not think that
he spends money rather too easily, and that he may find future
trouble in that direction.”

Mr. Bird at once became my partisan. “What opportunity
has the boy had for learning the value of money? When he
has learned what a dollar costs, by the actual experiment of
labor, he will be corrected. Thus far he has known the value
of a dollar only from one side of it. He knows what it will
buy, but he does not know what it costs. Some of the best
financiers I ever met were once boys who placed little or no
value upon money. No man can measure the value of a dollar
justly who cannot place by its side the expenditure of time
and labor which it costs. Arthur is learning all about it.”

“Thank you,” I responded, “I feel quite encouraged about
myself.”

“Now, then, what do you think of Henry, in his new circumstances?”
inquired Mr. Bradford.

“Henry,” replied Mr. Bird, “never had the faculty to learn
the value of a dollar, except through the difficulty of getting it.
The real superiority of Arthur over Henry in this matter is in
his faculty, not only to measure the value of a dollar by its cost,
but to measure it by its power. To know how to win money
and at the same time to know how to use it when won, is the
prerogative of the highest style of practical financial wisdom.
Now that money costs Henry nothing, he will cease to value
it; and with his tastes I think the care of his fortune will be
very irksome to him. Indeed, it would not be strange if, in five
years, that care should be transferred to the very hands that
surrendered the fortune to him. So our practical boy is quite
likely, in my judgment, to become a mere baby in business,
while our boy whose imagination seemed likely to run away
with him, will nurse him and his fortune together.”

“Why, that will be delightful,” I responded. “I shall be
certain to send the first business-card I get printed to Henry,
and solicit his patronage.”

There was much more said at the time about Henry's future
as well as my own, but the conversation I have rehearsed was
all that was of vital importance to me, and I will not burden
the reader with more. I cannot convey to any one an idea of
the interest which I took in this talk of my old teacher. It
somehow had the power to place me in possession of myself.
It recognized, in the presence of those who loved but did not
wholly trust me, powers and qualities which, in a half-blind way,
I saw within myself. It strengthened my self-respect and my
faith in my future.

Ah! if the old and the wise could know how the wisdom
won by their experience is taken into the heart of every earnest
young man, and how grateful to such a young man recognition
is, at the hand of the old and the wise, would they be stingy
with their hoard and reluctant with their hand? I do not believe

they would. They forget their youth, when they drop
peas instead of pearls, and are silly rather than sage.

When I left the house to return to my home, I was charged
with thoughts which kept me awake far into the night. The
only man from whom I had anything to fear as a rival was in
disgrace. My power to win a practical man's place in the
world had been recognized in Millie Bradford's presence, by
one whose opinion was very highly prized. I had achieved the
power of looking at myself and my possibilities through the
eyes of a wisdom-winning experience. I was inspired, encouraged
and strengthened, and my life had never seemed more full
of meaning and interest than it did then.

Early the next morning I went for Mr. Bird, accompanied
him to the stage-office, and bade him good-by, grateful for such
a friend, and determined to realize all that he had wished and
hoped for me.