“I'm quite willing to be educated,” I replied. “I haven't a doubt that I need it.”
She was leaning back in her chair, her hands behind her head, a posture she often assumed. She looked up at me amusedly.
“I'll acknowledge that you're more teachable than most of them,” she said. “Do you know, Hugh, sometimes you puzzle me greatly. When you are here and we're talking together I can never think of you as you are out in the world, fighting for power—and getting it. I suppose it's part of your charm, that there is that side of you, but I never consciously realize it. You're what they call a dual personality.”
“That's a pretty hard name!” I exclaimed.
She laughed.
“I can't help it—you are. Oh, not disagreeably so, quite normally—that's the odd thing about you. Sometimes I believe that you were made for something different, that in spite of your success you have missed your 'metier.'”
“What ought I to have been?”
“How can I tell? A Goethe, perhaps—a Goethe smothered by a twentieth-century environment. Your love of adventure isn't dead, it's been merely misdirected, real adventure, I mean, forth faring, straying into unknown paths. Perhaps you haven't yet found yourself.”
“How uncanny!” I said, stirred and startled.
“You have a taste for literature, you know, though you've buried it. Give me Turgeniev. We'll begin with him....”