“Certainly not. I want you to give Jack something to do, and we’ll live together, wherever you make him go--if it’s to Alaska.” “Oh--that’s it, is it? I begin to understand. I suppose Jack would think it would simplify matters very much if I gave him a hundred thousand dollars, wouldn’t he? That would be an even shorter way of giving him the means to support his family.” “Jack wouldn’t take money from you,” answered Katharine, quickly. “Wouldn’t he? If it were not such a risk, I’d try it, just to convince you. You seem to have a very exalted idea of Jack Ralston, altogether. I’ve not. Do you know anything about his life?” “Of course I do. I know how you all talk about the chances you’ve given him--between you. And I know just what they were--to try his hand at being a lawyer’s clerk first, and a banker’s clerk afterwards, with no salary and--” “If he had stuck to either for a year he would have had a very different sort of chance,” interrupted the old gentleman. “I told him so. There was little enough expected of him, I’m sure--just to go to an office every day, as most people do, and write what he was told to write. It wasn’t much to ask. Take the whole thing to pieces and look at it. What can he do? What do most men do who must make their way in the world? He has no exceptional talent, so he can’t go in for art or literature or that sort of thing. His father wouldn’t educate him for the navy, where he would have found his level, or where the Admiral’s name would have helped him. He didn’t get a technical education, which would have given him a chance to try engineering. There were only two things left--the law or business. I explained all that to him at the time. He shook his head and said he wanted something active. That’s just the way all young men talk who merely don’t want to stay in-doors and work decently hard, like other people. An active life! What is an active life? Ranching, I suppose he means, and he thinks he should do well on a ranch merely because he can ride fairly well. Riding fairly well doesn’t mean much on a ranch. The men out there can all ride better than he ever could, and he knows nothing about horses, nor cattle, nor about anything useful. Besides, with his temper, he’d be shot before he’d been out there a year--” “But there are all sorts of other things, and you forget Hamilton Bright, who began on a ranch--”