vine capacity for taking fire.

For a time his words fell unheeded upon Cameron's outer ear.

"To every man his own endowments, some great, some small, but, mark you,
no man left quite poverty-stricken. God gives every man his chance. No
man can look God in the face, not one of you here can say that you have
had no chance."

Cameron's vagrant mind, suddenly recalled, responded with a quick
assent. Opportunity? Endowment? Yes, surely. His mind flashed back over
the years of his education at the Academy and the University, long lazy
years. How little he had made of them! Others had turned them into the
gold of success. He wondered how old Dunn was getting on, and Linklater,
and little Martin. How far away seemed those days, and yet only some
four or five months separated him from them.

"One was a failure, a dead, flat failure," continued the preacher.
"Not so much a wicked man, no murderer, no drunkard, no gambler, but a
miserable failure. Poor fellow! At the end of life a wretched bankrupt,
losing even his original endowment. How would you like to come home
after ten, twenty, thirty years of experiment with life and confess to
your father that you were dead broke and no good?"

Again Cameron's mind came back from its wandering with a start. Go back
to his father a failure! He drew his lip down hard over his teeth. Not
while he lived! And yet, what was there in prospect for him? His whole
soul revolted against the dreary monotony and the narrowness of his
present life, and yet, what other path lay open? Cameron went straying
in fancy over the past, or in excursions into the future, while,
parallel with his rambling, the sermon continued to make its way through
its various heads and particulars.

"Why?" The voice of the preacher rose clear, dominant, arresting. "Why
did he fail so abjectly, so meanly, so despicably? For there is no
excuse for a failure. Listen! No man NEED fail. A man who is a failure
is a mean, selfish, lazy chump." Mr. Freeman was colloquial, if
anything. "Some men pity him. I don't. I have no use for him, and he is
the one thing in all the world that God himself has no use for."

Again Cameron's mind was jerked back as a runaway horse by a rein. So
far his life had been a failure. Was there then no excuse for failure?
What of his upbringing, his education, his environment? He had been
indulging the habit during these last weeks of shifting responsibility
from himself for what he had become.

"