showed plainly
through the uplift of the moment, and Wilbur had wondered what he found
to be so thrilled about. His own battle with life--he must have gone out
to the fight years ago under much the same circumstances--had apparently
brought him none of the glory he was now urging his young charges to
strive for. He had to stay in a schoolroom and breathe chalk dust.

Whatever the battle of life might be, he was going to fight it
out-of-doors; not like imprisoned school-teachers and clerks and
bookkeepers in First National banks. Only when alone under that splatter
of stars did he feel the moment big with more than a mere release from
textbooks. Then at last he knew that he had become a man and must put
away childish things, and his mind floated on the thought, off to those
distant stars where other boys had that night, perhaps unwittingly,
become men.

He wished that people would not pester him with solemn questions about
what he now meant to make of himself. They seemed to believe that he
should be concerned about this. Winona was especially insistent. She
said he stood at the parting of the ways; that all his future hung upon
his making a seemly choice; and she said it gloomily, with frank
foreboding, as one more than half expecting him to choose amiss.

Judge Penniman was another who warned him heavily that it was time to
quit being a Jack-of-all-trades. The judge spoke as from a topless tower
of achievement, relating anecdotes of his own persistence under
difficulties at the beginning of a career which he allowed his hearer to
infer had been of shining merit, hampered, it is true, by the most
trying ill health. Even Mrs. Penniman said that they were expecting
great things of him, now that he had become a man.

The boy dimly felt that there was something false in all this urgency.
The superintendent of schools and Winona and the judge and Mrs. Penniman
seemed to be tightly wound up with expectancy about him, yet lived their
own lives not too tensely. The superintendent of schools was not
inspiring as a model; the judge, for all his talk, lived a life of fat
idleness, with convenient maladies when the Penniman lawn needed mowing.
Mrs. Penniman, it is true, fought the battle of life steadily with her
plain and fancy dressmaking, but with no visible glory; and Winona
herself was becoming a drab, sedate spinster, troubled about many
things. He wondered why they should all conceive him to be meant for so
much more th