“No, I don’t choose to do it in the sense you mean; choosing from a whole world of professions, all possible. It was by the constraint of accident merely. Not that I object to the accident.”
“Why don’t you object—I mean, why do you feel so quiet about things?” Elfride was half afraid to question him so, but her intense curiosity to see what the inside of literary Mr. Knight was like, kept her going on.
Knight certainly did not mind being frank with her. Instances of this trait in men who are not without feeling, but are reticent from habit, may be recalled by all of us. When they find a listener who can by no possibility make use of them, rival them, or condemn them, reserved and even suspicious men of the world become frank, keenly enjoying the inner side of their frankness.
“Why I don’t mind the accidental constraint,” he replied, “is because, in making beginnings, a chance limitation of direction is often better than absolute freedom.”
“I see—that is, I should if I quite understood what all those generalities mean.”
“Why, this: That an arbitrary foundation for one’s work, which no length of thought can alter, leaves the attention free to fix itself on the work itself, and make the best of it.”
“Lateral compression forcing altitude, as would be said in that tongue,” she said mischievously. “And I suppose where no limit exists, as in the case of a rich man with a wide taste who wants to do something, it will be better to choose a limit capriciously than to have none.”
“Yes,” he said meditatively. “I can go as far as that.”
“Well,” resumed Elfride, “I think it better for a man’s nature if he does nothing in particular.”
“There is such a case as being obliged to.”