His mother
and he could manage comfortably on sixty dollars a month; and when
he laid his first earnings in her hand he even smiled with
satisfaction. She took the money in silence, her heart too full to
ask him whence it came. She had hoped against hope until that
moment; and the bills, as she looked at them, seemed to sting her
shrivelled hand.
One day, as she was cleaning her son's room, she opened a box that
stood in the corner, and was surprised to find it contain a
package done up in wrapping paper. She opened it with curiosity
and the tears sprang to her eyes as she saw the second-hand
medical books George had used at college. Here they were, in neat
wrappers, laid by for ever. Too precious to throw away, too
articulate of unfulfilled ambitions to stand exposed on shelves,
they had been laid away in the grave of her son's hopes. She did
them up again with trembling fingers, and that night when George
returned to supper, he found his mother in the dark, crying.
II
In the years from nineteen to forty-two most men have fulfilled
their destiny; those who have had within them the ability to rise
have risen; the weak, the wastrels, the mediocrities have shaken
down into their appointed places. Even the bummer has his own
particular bit of wall in front of the saloon and his own
particular chair within. Those who have something to do are busy
doing it, whatever it may be. In the human comedy everyone in time
finds his role and must play it to the end, happy indeed if he be
cast in a part that at all suits him.
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