y character?"

She nodded severely.

"What can I do to mend it? Do sit down and talk it over. No, really,
I won't if you'll only sit down!"

She looked at me with a wondering distrust which was much more to my
mind than her whole-hearted confidence. How primitive and bestial it
looks when you put it down in black and white!--and perhaps after all
it is only a feeling peculiar to myself. Anyhow, she sat down.

"Now tell me what's amiss with me?"

"I'm in love with somebody else," said she.

It was my turn to jump out of my chair.

"It's nobody in particular," she explained, laughing at the expression
of my face: "only an ideal. I've never met the kind of man I mean."

"Tell me about him. What does he look like?"

"Oh, he might look very much like you."

"How dear of you to say that! Well, what is it that he does that I
don't do? Just say the word,--teetotal, vegetarian, aeronaut,
theosophist, superman. I'll have a try at it, Gladys, if you will only
give me an idea what would please you."

She laughed at the elasticity of my character. "Well, in the first
place, I don't think my ideal would speak like that," said she. "He
would be a harder, sterner man, not so ready to adapt himself to a
silly girl's whim. But, above all, he must be a man who could do, who
could act, who could look Death in the face and have no fear of him, a
man of great deeds and strange experiences. It is never a man that I
should love, but always the glories he had won; for they would be
reflected upon me. Think of Richard Burton! When I read his wife's
life of him I could so understand her love! And Lady Stanley! Did you
ever read the wonderful last chapter of that book about her husband?
These are the sort of men that a woman could worship with all her soul,
and yet be the greater, not the less, on account of her love, honored
by all the world as the inspirer of noble deeds."

She looked so beautiful in her enthusiasm that I nearly brought down
the whole level of the interview. I gripped myself hard, and went on
with the argument.

"We can't all be Stanleys and Burtons," said I; "besides, we don't get
the chance,--at least, I never had the chance. If I did, I should try
to take it."

"But chances are all around you. It is the mark of the kind of man I
mean that he makes his own chances. You can't hold him back. I've
never met him, and yet I seem to know him so well. There are heroisms
all round us waiting to