"Yet, it was the next step?"
"Yes, it was the next step. I meant that one does not care to be victor because the leading cars were wrecked. There is no elation in defeating a driver who lies out on the course. But, as you say, it helped my purpose. You," he hesitated for the right phrase, "you are most kind to recall that I have a purpose."
It was the convent-bred Emily who looked back at him, earnest-eyed, exaltedly serious.
"I have thought of it often. Every one else that I know just lives the way things happen—there are only a few people who grasp things and make them happen. That is real work; so many of us are just given work we do not want—" she broke off.
"If we do not want the work, it is probably not our own," said Lestrange. "Unless we have brought it on ourselves by a fault we must undo—I need not speak of that to you. One must not make the mistake of assuming some one else's work."
He spoke gently, almost as if with a clairvoyant reading of her tendency to self-immolation.
"But may not some one else's fault be given us to undo?" she asked eagerly. "May not their work be forced on us?"
"No," he answered.
"No?" bewildered.
"I don't think so. Each one of us has enough with his own, at least so it seems to me. Most of us die before we finish it."