I gazed at her as she spoke, with a feeling akin to awe. “It must destroy the plot-interest of life for you, Hilda,” I cried—out there in the vast void of that wild African plateau—“to foresee so well what each person will do—how each will act under such given circumstances.”
She pulled a bent of grass and plucked off its dry spikelets one by one. “Perhaps so,” she answered, after a meditative pause; “though, of course, all natures are not equally simple. Only with great souls can you be sure beforehand like that, for good or for evil. It is essential to anything worth calling character that one should be able to predict in what way it will act under given circumstances—to feel certain, 'This man will do nothing small or mean,' 'That one could never act dishonestly, or speak deceitfully.' But smaller natures are more complex. They defy analysis, because their motives are not consistent.”
“Most people think to be complex is to be great,” I objected.
She shook her head. “That is quite a mistake,” she answered. “Great natures are simple, and relatively predictable, since their motives balance one another justly. Small natures are complex, and hard to predict, because small passions, small jealousies, small discords and perturbations come in at all moments, and override for a time the permanent underlying factors of character. Great natures, good or bad, are equably poised; small natures let petty motives intervene to upset their balance.”
“Then you knew I would come,” I exclaimed, half pleased to find I belonged inferentially to her higher category.
Her eyes beamed on me with a beautiful light. “Knew you would come? Oh, yes. I begged you not to come; but I felt sure you were too deeply in earnest to obey me. I asked a friend in Cape Town to telegraph your arrival; and almost ever since the telegram reached me I have been expecting you and awaiting you.”
“So you believed in me?”
“Implicitly—as you in me. That is the worst of it, Hubert. If you did NOT believe in me, I could have told you all—and then, you would have left me. But, as it is, you KNOW all—and yet, you want to cling to me.”
“You know I know all—because Sebastian told me?”
“Yes; and I think I even know how you answered him.”