He sat up straighter.
“I’ll prove my definition to be more correct than yours,” he insisted. “What is ambition?—a desire for power, for superiority. It’s utterly selfish, an egotistical quality. It springs from greed of gain, either of recognition or of material benefit. Can that be considered other than an ignoble sentiment?”
“Not as you put it,” she dissented. “But I dispute your definition. Ambition is a lofty endeavour to excel.”
“Well, it may be... sometimes it is,” he allowed. “But in this very human world it is oftener the more sordid sentiment I described. I merely dragged the wings from your ideal and brought it down to earth.”
“I believe that is what you enjoy doing,” she said, a touch of reproach in her voice.
“What do we know better than this dear mother earth?” he asked, and pressed his hand heavily upon the sand. “She is altogether beautiful, save where man, in the determined pursuit of ambition, has scarred and changed her face. That idea of living at a high mental altitude is mere presumption. It’s an age of posing. We catch at a phrase that sounds fine, and adopt it because of its fine sound. There isn’t any need to live up to the sentiment it expresses—very often it doesn’t express much. There’s a cult that’s called, I believe, the Higher Thought Movement. People read books—or they don’t read them, but simply own them and talk vaguely of the higher things they express. It doesn’t go far beyond talking as a rule. I never met any one who could transmit higher thought. It’s another catch phrase.”
“Doesn’t every one have those thoughts at some time?” she asked quietly, without resenting his speech as he had half expected her to do.
“Higher thoughts? ... Yes, I suppose so. Only one doesn’t talk about them.”
“No,” she returned; “you are right. One would have difficulty in expressing those things—particularly in high sounding phrases.”
“Truth is never adorned,” he said—“which possibly accounts for the frequency with which she is disregarded.”