"You can answer that yourself, Jim. She's far from it: you and I are not saint-worshippers. But she has it in her to be a saint, if her attention and her latent force were turned that way. She can be anything, or do anything. She hasn't found her life yet. She bides her time, and I wait with her. Her wings will sprout some day. I like her well enough as she is."
"Evidently. Do you know, old man, that you are talking very freely?"
"Am I the first? or do you suppose I would say all this to any chance comer? You opened your soul to me in May, as far as you knew it: you are welcome to see into mine now."
"There is a difference. I cared for nothing, and believed in nothing; so my soul was worth little. Yours is that of a prosperous and happy man."
"Externals are not the measure of the soul, Jim, nor yet creeds. I know a gentleman when I see him, and so do you. Your soul will get its food yet, and assume its full stature; you've been trying to starve it partly, that's all."
"Do you talk this way to your Princess, Bob?"
"No. She is younger than we: why should I bore her? You and I are on equal terms: she and I are not."
"This humility is very chivalric, but I don't quite understand it in you, Bob."
"You can't: you've been so long unused to women, and you never knew one like her. If you had, it would have been too early; what does a boy of twenty know of himself, or of the girls he thinks he is in love with, or of the true relations that should exist between him and them? Call it quixotic if you like; I don't mind. Any gentleman, that is, any spiritual man, has it in him to be a Quixote. When you come to know Clarice, you will understand."
"Do you call yourself and me spiritual men, Bob?"