"Not in the least. I am content to leave that entirely to fate."
"Bucolic? Intellectual? An artist? A man of affairs?"
She made a little grimace.
"How can I tell? I cannot conceive caring for an ordinary person, but then every woman feels like that. And, you see, if I did care, he wouldn't be ordinary—to me. And so far as I am concerned," she insisted, with a shade of restlessness in her manner, "that finishes the subject. You must please devote yourself to telling me at least some of the things I want to know. What is the use of having one of the world's successful men tête-a-tête, a prisoner to my hospitality, unless I can make him gratify my curiosity?"
The thought created by her words burned through his mind like a flash of destroying lightning.
"One of the world's successful men," he repeated. "Is that how I seem to you?"
"And to the world," she asserted.
He shook his head sadly.
"I have worked very hard," he said. "I have been very ambitious. A few of my ambitions have been gratified, but the glory of them has passed with attainment. Now I enter upon the last lap and I possess none of the things I started out in life to achieve."
"But how absurd!" she exclaimed. "You are one of our great politicians.
You would have to be reckoned with in any regrouping of parties."