"Are the cases so different as you suppose ?" she went on, with her quick glance.
"Is it not partly accident?
A man of science, you see, early in life, takes up, half by chance, this, that, or the other particular form of study.

But what the study is in itself, I fancy, does not greatly matter; do not mere circumstances as often as not determine it?
Surely it is the temperament, on the whole, that tells: the temperament that is or is not scientific." "How do you mean?
You ARE so enigmatic!" "Well, in a family of the scientific temperament, it seems to me, one brother may happen to go in for butterflies--may he not ?--and another for geology, or for submarine telegraphs.

Now, the man who happens to take up butterflies does not make a fortune out of his hobby--there is no money in butterflies; so we say, accordingly, he is an unpractical person, who cares nothing for business, and who is only happy when he is out in the fields with a net, chasing emperors and tortoise-shells.

But the man who happens to fancy submarine telegraphy most likely invents a lot of new improvements, takes out dozens of patents, finds money flow in upon him as he sits in his study, and becomes at last a peer and a millionaire; so then we say, What a splendid business head he has got, to be sure, and how immensely he differs from his poor wool-gathering brother, the entomologist, who can only invent new ways of hatching out wire-worms! Yet all may really depend on the first chance direction which led one brother as a boy to buy a butterfly net, and sent the other into the school laboratory to dabble with an electric wheel and a cheap battery." "Then you mean to say it is chance that has made Sebastian ?" Hilda shook her pretty head.

"By no means.