Webster, nevertheless, both at home and at school made his impression. No one could have defined the nature of the impression but every one knew he made it. If he failed at his lessons, his teachers were not angry; they looked mortified and said as little as possible and all the while pushed him along by hook or crook, until at last they had smuggled him into high school--the final heaven of the whole torment. The impression upon his school fellows was likewise strongly in his favour. Toward the close of each session there was intense struggle and strain for the highest mark in class and the next highest and the next. When the nerve-racking race was over and everybody had time to look around and inquire for Webster, they could see him cantering quietly down the home stretch, unmindful of the good-natured jeers that greeted his arrival: he had gone over the course, he had not run. As soon as they were out of doors in a game, Webster stepped to the front. Those who had just outstripped him now followed him. Roadless parents--a child looking for its road in life! That is Nature's plan to stop imitation, to block the roads of parents to their children, and force these into new paths for the development of the individual and of the race. And in what other country is that spectacle so common as in our American democracy, where progress is so swift and the future so vast and untrod and untried that nearly every generation in thousands of cottages represents a revolt and a revolution of children against their parents, their work and their ways? But Webster's father and mother were not philosophers as to how Nature works out her plan through our American democracy: they merely had their parental apprehensions and confidentially discussed these. What would Webster be, would he ever be anything? He would finish at high school this year and it was time to decide. A son of the grocer in the block had made an unexpected upward stride in life and surprised all the cottagers. Webster's father and mother took care to bring this meritorious example to their son's attention. "What are _you_ going to be, Webster?" his mother asked one morning at breakfast, looking understandingly at Webster's father. "I don't know what I'm going to be," Webster had replied unconcernedly. "I know I'm not going to be what _he_ is!" "It would never do to try to force him," his father said later. "Not _him_. Besides, think of a couple of American parents undertaking to force their children to do anything--_any_ children! We'll have to wait a while longer. If he's never to be anything, of course forcing could never make him into something. It would certainly bring on a family disturbance and the family disturbance would be sure to get on my nerves at the bank and I might make mistakes in my figures."