“O! So your ideal is to gratify me. That is something, then.”
“It is everything, I think. And now it is your turn to confess your ideal.”
She looked at me very steadily. “It is to see you realise yours.”
“Bouille-abaisse?”
“Something,” she said, ignoring my comment—“some dream which you and that man, however much you may laugh at and despise him, may share in common. I cannot say what it is, but I can trace your pursuit of it through all of your works that I have seen. You are shy and proud, mon ami; you affect to laugh at the heroic in yourself; you meet the rebuffs of the world with a pretence of their being justified towards incompetence. But all the time you know the world is wrong, though the great in you will not condescend to parly with it as to your merits. Better, you think, to give up the struggle, to cease your pursuit of the inaccessible, and, falling into line with your detractors, hunt for bouille-abaisse, as the sort of perfection we can all understand and attain. I would sooner be a dog and sniff for truffles.”
I sat silent for awhile, a little surprised, a little amused; then answered quietly:—
“The inaccessible is the inaccessible, Fifine. Perhaps it takes a grown man to find that out.”
“You might as well say,” she replied, “that the stars are not to be searched because they are beyond our reach.”
“Well, what has astronomy done for us?”
“It has made astronomers.”