exposed points leads, on
the whole, the happiest life. How can a man enjoy himself freely when
a piece of defective plumbing, the bursting of a toy pistol, the
carelessness of a nurse, may plunge him into a life-long sorrow? I
don't say it's a very noble life that I propose to myself, but it's a
safe one. I'm too nervous and anxious to stand the responsibilities of
matrimony."

"If you can't stand responsibility," said Doddridge, "I don't see why
you choose the law for a profession. You don't seem to me cut out for
a lawyer anyway. I always thought you meant to be some kind of a
literary chap."

"Yes," said Berkeley, "why don't you go for a snug berth under the
government, or study for a tutorship here? That's the life that would
suit you, old man."

"Not at all," answered Armstrong; "I have a horror of any salaried
position, or of any position where a man is obliged to conform his
habits and opinions to other people's. It is the worst sort of
dependence. Now a lawyer in successful practice, and especially if he
is a bachelor, is about as independent as a man can be. His relations
with his clients are merely professional, and what he does or thinks
privately is nobody's business."

"If you are going to be a mere lawyer," asked Clay, "what becomes of
your education and your intellectual satisfactions, etc.?"

"A man can get his best intellectual satisfactions out of the work of
his profession," answered Armstrong. "Besides, as to that, there's
time enough. Fifteen years of solid work will enable one to put by a
fair competence, if he lives carefully and has no one but himself to
support; and then he will be free to take up a hobby. Oh, I shall
cultivate a hobby or two after awhile. It keeps the mind healthy to
have some interest of the kind outside of one's business. I may take
to book-collecting or numismatics or raising orchids. Perhaps I may
become an authority on ancient armor; time enough for that by and by.
And then I can cut over to Europe every summer if I like, and no one
to interfere with my down-sittings or my up-risings, my goings-out or
my comings-in. Do you know," he went on, after a pause, "how I always
look to myself in the glass of the future? I figure myself like old
Tulkinghorn, in 'Bleak House,'--going down into his reverberating
vaults for a bottle of choice vintage, after the work of the day, and
then sitting quietly in the twilight in his dusky, old-fashioned law
chambers, sipping his wine w