t'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.

'As far as I was thinking of you at a