She said he stood at the parting of the ways; that all his future hung upon his making a seemly choice; and she said it gloomily, with frank foreboding, as one more than half expecting him to choose amiss.
Judge Penniman was another who warned him heavily that it was time to quit being a Jack-of-all-trades.

The judge spoke as from a topless tower of achievement, relating anecdotes of his own persistence under difficulties at the beginning of a career which he allowed his hearer to infer had been of shining merit, hampered, it is true, by the most trying ill health.

Even Mrs.Penniman said that they were expecting great things of him, now that he had become a man.
The boy dimly felt that there was something false in all this urgency.
The superintendent of schools and Winona and the judge and Mrs.Penniman seemed to be tightly wound up with expectancy about him, yet lived their own lives not too tensely.

The superintendent of schools was not inspiring as a model; the judge, for all his talk, lived a life of fat idleness, with convenient maladies when the Penniman lawn needed mowing.
Mrs.Penniman, it is true, fought the battle of life steadily with her plain and fancy dressmaking, but with no visible glory; and Winona herself was becoming a drab, sedate spinster, troubled about many things.

He wondered why they should all conceive him to be meant for so much more than they had achieved.