“You don’t like dead levels, then?” he suggested.
She shook her head.
“No, I like hills—something to look up to—to climb.”
“Spiritual as well as temporal?”
She was silent a moment.
“Why, yes, I think I do.”
He smiled sardonically.
“It’s just that terrible angelic tendency of yours I complain of. It’s too much for any mere material man to live up to. I wish you’d step down to my low level occasionally. You don’t seem to be afflicted with human passions like the rest of us”—he added, a note of irritation in his voice.
“Indeed I am!”
Jean spoke impulsively, out of the depths of that inner, almost unconscious self-knowledge which lies within each one of us, dormant until some lance-like question pricks it into spontaneous affirmation. She had hardly heeded whither the conversation was tending, and she regretted her frank confession the instant it had left her lips.