For this reason he could not neglect his work, although it had not a first place in his heart.

As he was industrious, he did not fail in it; because it was not the thing he loved best, he did not markedly succeed.

It was too late to change his profession, and he found in himself no such decided aptitude for anything else as should make him know that this or that would have been preferable; but he knew now that the genius of the physician was not his, that to do his work because it was duty, and to attain the respectable success which circumstance, rather than mental pre-eminence, gives, was all that he could hope.

This saddened him; all his ambition revived under the smarting consciousness of inferiority to his more talented companions.
The pleasures of his life came to him through his receptive faculties, and in the consciousness of having seen the wider vision, and being in consequence a nobler man.

But all this, which was so much to him for a year or two, grew to be a less strong sensation than that of disappointment in the fact that he could only so meagrely fulfil his father's ideal and his own.