“What thing?”
“The fact that you’ve got to recognize to yourself, whatever you’re hoping for, that you’ve gone as far as you can go.” He thought a moment. “If you could only fool yourself! Some do—that’s where conceit comes in—a mighty saving quality that, to be wrapped up in vanity, not to know when you’ve stopped.”
She was so puzzled by this and the tense introspection which she felt in him that she ventured a question.
“What are you talking about, Mr. Dan?”
He turned and said:
“Remember once I told you how I used to climb up Montmartre and look down on Paris, and believe the day would come when I’d set them all talking about me—when I believed I was going to be a great man?”
She came and settled on the ground beside him as he sat in the great armchair, looking gravely into his face.
“Remember?”
She nodded.
“Well, it’s great to believe that, even for a year, to be working passionately, hungrily, sure of where you’re going,” he said, smiling back into the past. “It’s worth—even what comes after. But you pay for it—Lord, but you pay for it!—when you look at yourself in the end, and know the time’s to come when you’ve got to stand still and watch others go on.”