Here Mark Twain was utterly at sea. His essential instinct, the instinct of the artist, had been thwarted and repressed. Nevertheless, just because he was essentially an artist, he was a greenhorn in the tricks of getting on. Why, it was a constant surprise to him at first that people laughed at his stories and gave him gold and silver for telling them! His acquisitive instinct, no doubt, had asserted itself with the lapse of his creative instinct; still, it was not, so to speak, a personal instinct, it was only the instinct of his heredity and his environment which had sprung up in a spirit that had been swept clear for it; it was wholly unable to focus Mark Twain. He, all his life the most inept of business men, without practical judgment, without foresight, without any of Poor Richard's virtues, was "never," says Mr. Howells, "a man who cared anything about money except as a dream, and he wanted more and more of it to fill out the spaces of this dream." Yes, to fill out the spaces the prodigious failure of his genius had left vacant! To win fame and fortune, meanwhile, as his parents had wished him to do, had now become his dominant desire, and almost every one he met knew more about the art of success than he did. He had to "make good," but in order to do so he had to subject himself to those who knew the ropes. Consequently, whoever excelled him in skill, in manners, in prestige, stood to him _in loco parentis_; and, to complete the ironic circle, he was endlessly grateful to those who led him about, like a Savoyard bear, because he felt, as was indeed true, that it was to them he owed the success he had attained. This is the real meaning of Mr. Paine's remark: "It was always Mark Twain's habit to rely on somebody."