"Madame de Staël said that traveling was sad. Is it so?"
"To the lover of history it is like food without salt: imagination has painted an historical city with the panorama of a great time; it has been to us a stage for great events. We find it a stage with familiar paraphernalia, and actors as commonplace as ourselves."
"It is more satisfactory to stay at home and read about it?"
"Infinitely, though less expanding."
"Then is anything worth while except reading?
"Several things; the pursuit of glory, for one thing, and the active occupied life necessary for its achievement."
She leaned forward a little; she felt that she had stumbled nearer to him. "Are you ambitious?" she asked.
"For what it compels life to yield; abstractly, not. Ambition is the looting of hell in chase of biting flames swirling above a desert of ashes. As for posthumous fame, it must be about as satisfactory as a draught of ice-water poured down the throat of a man who has died on Sahara. And yet, even if in the end it all means nothing, if 'from hour to hour we ripe and ripe and then from hour to hour we rot and rot,' still for a quarter-century or so the nettle of ambition flagellating our brain may serve to make life less uninteresting and more satisfactory. The abstraction and absorption of the fight, the stinging fear of rivals, the murmur of acknowledgment, the shout of compelled applause,—they fill the blanks."
"Tell me," she said, imperiously, "what do you want?"
"Shall I tell you? I never have spoken of it to a living soul but Alvarado. Shall I tell it to a woman,—and an Iturbi y Moncada? Could the folly of man further go?"