Ethel said only "Thanks!" as she received it.
"You don't mind my keeping the other?"
"Oh no—not if—I like you to have it."
"And I like you to have this. I read it through pretty nearly every day."
Ethel mentally determined to do the same.
"That fourth quotation always seems to me an exact description of—you."
She started. As he spoke her mind had leapt ahead of the words, putting "Fulvia" at the end.
"Oh no!" she said again. "If you knew me—"
"I think I do; better than I know any one else in the world. And, Ethel, I am trying to make it my rule of life, just as I know you do. Yes, I know, because I can see. But one doesn't find the rule easy to follow." He opened the folded page in Ethel's hand, not taking it from her, and read: "'To sacrifice self as an habitual law in each sudden call to action; to take more and more secretly the lowest place; to move amid constant distractions and above them undisturbedly—' as you do, and as I don't."
"I am not like that, indeed, indeed," Ethel murmured.