“Yes, yes; I was speaking of when you are not obliged for any other reason than delight in the prospect of fame. I have thought many times lately that a thin widespread happiness, commencing now, and of a piece with the days of your life, is preferable to an anticipated heap far away in the future, and none now.”
“Why, that’s the very thing I said just now as being the principle of all ephemeral doers like myself.”
“Oh, I am sorry to have parodied you,” she said with some confusion. “Yes, of course. That is what you meant about not trying to be famous.” And she added, with the quickness of conviction characteristic of her mind: “There is much littleness in trying to be great. A man must think a good deal of himself, and be conceited enough to believe in himself, before he tries at all.”
“But it is soon enough to say there is harm in a man’s thinking a good deal of himself when it is proved he has been thinking wrong, and too soon then sometimes. Besides, we should not conclude that a man who strives earnestly for success does so with a strong sense of his own merit. He may see how little success has to do with merit, and his motive may be his very humility.”
This manner of treating her rather provoked Elfride. No sooner did she agree with him than he ceased to seem to wish it, and took the other side. “Ah,” she thought inwardly, “I shall have nothing to do with a man of this kind, though he is our visitor.”
“I think you will find,” resumed Knight, pursuing the conversation more for the sake of finishing off his thoughts on the subject than for engaging her attention, “that in actual life it is merely a matter of instinct with men—this trying to push on. They awake to a recognition that they have, without premeditation, begun to try a little, and they say to themselves, ‘Since I have tried thus much, I will try a little more.’ They go on because they have begun.”
Elfride, in her turn, was not particularly attending to his words at this moment. She had, unconsciously to herself, a way of seizing any point in the remarks of an interlocutor which interested her, and dwelling upon it, and thinking thoughts of her own thereupon, totally oblivious of all that he might say in continuation. On such occasions she artlessly surveyed the person speaking; and then there was a time for a painter. Her eyes seemed to look at you, and past you, as you were then, into your future; and past your future into your eternity—not reading it, but gazing in an unused, unconscious way—her mind still clinging to its original thought.
This is how she was looking at Knight.
Suddenly Elfride became conscious of what she was doing, and was painfully confused.
“What were you so intent upon in me?” he inquired.