“Well, you know what I mean, even though my words are badly selected and commonplace,” she said impatiently. “Because I utter commonplace words, you must not suppose I think only commonplace thoughts. My poor stock of words are like a limited number of rough moulds I have to cast all my materials in, good and bad; and the novelty or delicacy of the substance is often lost in the coarse triteness of the form.”
“Very well; I’ll believe that ingenious representation. As to the subject in hand—lives which are failures—you need not trouble yourself. Anybody’s life may be just as romantic and strange and interesting if he or she fails as if he or she succeed. All the difference is, that the last chapter is wanting in the story. If a man of power tries to do a great deed, and just falls short of it by an accident not his fault, up to that time his history had as much in it as that of a great man who has done his great deed. It is whimsical of the world to hold that particulars of how a lad went to school and so on should be as an interesting romance or as nothing to them, precisely in proportion to his after renown.”
They were walking between the sunset and the moonrise. With the dropping of the sun a nearly full moon had begun to raise itself. Their shadows, as cast by the western glare, showed signs of becoming obliterated in the interest of a rival pair in the opposite direction which the moon was bringing to distinctness.
“I consider my life to some extent a failure,” said Knight again after a pause, during which he had noticed the antagonistic shadows.
“You! How?”
“I don’t precisely know. But in some way I have missed the mark.”
“Really? To have done it is not much to be sad about, but to feel that you have done it must be a cause of sorrow. Am I right?”
“Partly, though not quite. For a sensation of being profoundly experienced serves as a sort of consolation to people who are conscious of having taken wrong turnings. Contradictory as it seems, there is nothing truer than that people who have always gone right don’t know half as much about the nature and ways of going right as those do who have gone wrong. However, it is not desirable for me to chill your summer-time by going into this.”
“You have not told me even now if I am really vain.”
“If I say Yes, I shall offend you; if I say No, you’ll think I don’t mean it,” he replied, looking curiously into her face.