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.
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