“I thought you had—I was sure you had,” he said in a troubled sort of way. He did not see that she was eluding him.
“I mean, I never had a fixed and definite idea that I proceeded to apply, as you have done,” she explained tentatively. “But—well, I suppose that the first requisite for success is absolute belief in the idea; that it be part of one’s life; to suffer for, to fight for, to die for, if need be—though that sounds like a handbook of moral mottoes, doesn’t it?”
“That’s it, that’s it,” he said. “The thing must be in your bones—hein?”
“Also in—your blood—hein?” she rejoined slowly and meaningly, looking over the top of her coffee-cup at him. Somehow again the plebeian quality in that hein grated on her, and she could not resist the retort.
“What!” said he confusedly, plunging into another pitfall. She had challenged him, and he knew it. “Nothing what-ever,” she answered, with an urbanity that defied the suggestion of malice. Yet, now that she remembered, she had sweetly challenged one of a royal house for the like lapse into the vulgar tongue. A man should not be beheaded because of a what. So she continued more seriously: “The idea must be himself, all of him, born with him, the rightful output of his own nature, the thing he must inevitably do, or waste his life.”
She looked him honestly in the eyes. She had spoken with the soft irony of truth, the blind tyranny of the just. She had meant to test him here and there by throwing little darts of satire, and yet he made her serious and candid in spite of herself. He was of kin to her in some part of his nature. He did not concern her as a man of personal or social possibilities—merely as an active originality. Leaning back languidly, she was eyeing him closely from under drooping lids, smiling, too, in an unimportant sort of way, as if what she had said was a trifle.
Consummate liar and comedian, or true man and no pretender, his eyes did not falter. They were absorbed, as if in eager study of a theme.
“Yes, yes, that’s it; and if he has it, what next?” said he meaningly.
“Well, then, opportunity, joined to coolness, knowledge of men, power of combination, strategy, and”—she paused, and a purely feminine curiosity impelled her to add suggestively—“and a woman.”
He nodded. “And a woman,” he repeated after her musingly, and not turning it to account cavalierly, as he might have done. He was taking himself with a simple seriousness that appealed to her.