"As the Great Emperor said," he answered. "A woman sees farther than a man, and if she has judgment as well, she is the best prophet in the world."
"It sounds distinctly like a compliment," she answered. "You are trying to break that square!"
She was mystified; he was different from any man she had ever entertained. She was not half sure she liked it. Yet, if he were in very truth a prince—she thought of his debut in flowered waistcoat, panama hat, and enamelled boots!—she should take this confidence as a compliment; if he were a barber, she could not resent it; she could not waste wit or time; she could not even, in extremity, call the servant to show the barber out; and in any case she was too comfortably interested to worry herself with speculation.
He was very much in earnest. "I want to ask you," he said, "what is the thing most needed to make a great idea succeed."
"I have never had a great idea," she replied.
He looked at her eagerly, with youthful, questioning eyes.
"How simple, and yet how astute he is!" she thought, remembering the event of yesterday.
"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?"