"Try me."
"Well, then, it seems to me you do not often enough try to do your best. You are contented to do well, and not ambitious to do better. You are quite satisfied, so I think, if your sermons are good enough to please generally, instead of seeking to raise your standard all the time by hard effort toward improvement, and I doubt, therefore, if at the end of a year your sermons will show any marked change from what they are to-day. Am I too hard?"
"You are very just," answered Denham, pleasantly, though the blood mounted to his face. "You have found out my weak spot. I confess I am not ambitious. I aspire to no greatness of any kind."
"You have discovered the secret of contentment," said De Forest, with effusive approbation. "I am glad to have met you, Mr. Halloway. You are the one happy man I know."
"The secret of contentment?" repeated Gerald. "Say rather the principle of all stagnation, mental and spiritual. Not to aspire to become greater than one can be is to fall short of becoming all that one may be; to be satisfied with one's powers is to dwarf them hopelessly."
"A powerful argument against conceit," reflected De Forest. "Still, upon my word, I think I would as lief be conceited in every pore as eternally in a state of dissatisfaction with myself about every thing."
"It is well, above all, I think, to have a just appreciation of one's own powers or lack of powers," said Denham, slowly. "Ambition, without the corresponding strength to gratify it, is a cruel taskmaster."
"How can you tell, till you have tried, that there is no corresponding strength?" asked Gerald, turning full upon him again. How marvellously expressive her face was, with its earnest eyes and mobile mouth! "If I were a man,—and great heavens! how I wish I were one!—I would create the strength if it were not there of itself. I would force myself upward. I would never rest till I had become something more than nature originally made me."
"Then Heaven be thanked, who has spared us the monstrosity you would have developed into under the harrowing circumstances of a reversal of your sex," said De Forest, devoutly.
"I was always glad you were a woman. Now I am positively aglow with gratitude for it."