ett, authors need some encouragement.
When I left Evelyn she was going to her room with your book in her hand."

XIX

Why should not Philip trust the future? He was a free man. He had given
no hostages to fortune. Even if he did not succeed, no one else would be
involved in his failure. Why not follow his inclination, the dream of
his boyhood?

He was at liberty to choose for himself. Everybody in America is; this
is the proclamation of its blessed independence. Are we any better off
for the privilege of following first one inclination and then another,
which is called making a choice? Are they not as well off, and on the
whole as likely to find their right place, who inherit their callings in
life, whose careers are mapped out from the cradle by circumstance and
convention? How much time do we waste in futile experiment? Freedom to
try everything, which is before the young man, is commonly freedom to
excel in nothing.

There are, of course, exceptions. The blacksmith climbs into a city
pulpit. The popular preacher becomes an excellent insurance agent. The
saloon-keeper develops into the legislator, and wears the broadcloth and
high hat of the politician. The brakeman becomes the railway magnate,
and the college graduate a grocer's clerk, and the messenger-boy, picking
up by chance one day the pen, and finding it run easier than his legs,
becomes a power on a city journal, and advises society how to conduct
itself and the government how to make war and peace. All this adds to
the excitement and interest of life. On the whole, we say that people
get shaken into their right places, and the predetermined vocation is
often a mistake. There is the anecdote of a well-known clergyman who,
being in a company with his father, an aged and distinguished doctor of
divinity, raised his monitory finger and exclaimed, "Ah, you spoiled a
first-rate carpenter when you made a poor minister of me."

Philip thought he was calmly arguing the matter with himself. How often
do we deliberately weigh such a choice as we would that of another
person, testing our inclination by solid reason? Perhaps no one could
have told Philip what he ought to do, but every one who knew him, and the
circumstances, knew what he would do. He was, in fact, already doing it
while he was paltering with his ostensible profession. But he never
would have confessed, probably he would then have been ashamed to
confess, how much his decision to break with the