"You ought to be," he asserted; "you have nothing to worry about unless it is your ambition to become a great artist, and as I have told you, you had better put that out of your thoughts. You could be, but it would bring you more heartaches than you can imagine. Put it away, Mona, and live your simple life here. To struggle out of your orbit is to court unhappiness. I was thrust out of mine by death and poverty," he added sadly, "when an awkward and green country boy, knowing absolutely nothing of city ways and manners, and placed among those who think all who come from the farms must be but half civilized and stupid. It is the shallow conceit of city-bred people always and the greatest mistake they make. My aunt sent me to a business college, and for a year my life there was a burden. The other fellows made game of my clothes, my opinions, and, worse than that, a jest of all the moral ideas in which my good mother had instructed me. Later on, when I began to get out into the world, I found the same disposition to sneer at all that is pure and good in life. The young men I became acquainted with called me a goody-good because I acted according to conscience and refused to drink or gamble. They seemed to take a pride in their ability to pour down glass after glass of fiery liquor, and when I asserted that to visit gambling dens and all other resorts of vice was to demean one's self, and positively refused to follow them, they laughed me to scorn. They seemed to take a pride in their vices in a way that was disgusting to me. Then, as if to prove what a stupid greenhorn I was, they pointed out men who stood well socially, attended church, had wives and families, and yet led lives that were a shame and disgrace in my estimation. They proved to me what they asserted in various ways, so I could not doubt it. It was all a revelation, and for a time upset all my ideas and led me to think my early training in the way I should walk a stupid waste of opportunity. "Beyond that, and perhaps the worst of all, I was made to think that religious belief was arrant nonsense and used as a cloak for evil doings; that none except silly old women and equally silly young girls were sincere in pious professions; that belief in God was an index to shallowness, and prayer a farce. "It began to seem to me that I really had been brought up wrong and trained in absurd ways, and that unless I threw my moral scruples to the winds, I should be a jest and a laughing-stock to all city people. We grow to feel, and think, and live like those we meet daily, and when I came here, among you whose lives and morals were so unlike city folks and so like those of the people among whom I was reared, it seemed as if I had gone back to my boyhood home. "I think the sound of your church bells, Mona, was an influence more potent than all else to carry my thoughts and feelings home again."