I want to talk to you." And when he had persuaded her to sit down
once more, he exerted himself to amuse her, and before long had the
satisfaction of seeing that she had forgotten her agitation. It did
not take him long to discover that she had read a great deal and that
her favorite reading had been travels, and he entertained her with
graphic recitals of such of his own varied experience as he thought
most likely to interest her. She listened with flattering attention
and a natural and keen sense of humor, and he was stimulated to a good
deal more effort than habit prompted. "You will enjoy travelling," he
said, finally; "and you will not travel like other women. You will see
something besides picture-galleries, and churches, and _Bons marches_.
I believe that you would realize what it is to be an atom of to-day in
the presence of twenty centuries."

She smiled up at him with quick sympathy. "Yes," she said, "I believe
one must more frequently be awed than pleased, or even enraptured. And
I can imagine how even the most self-content of men, if he absorb the
meaning of Europe, must feel his insignificance. If he has wit enough
to reflect that all these represented ages, with their extraordinary
results, abstract and concrete, have come and gone with no aid of his;
that no prophet ever whispered his name among the thousands of great
in every conceivable destiny; that he is, mentally and physically,
simply a result of evolution and civilization, not, in any way worth
mentioning, a cause, he will be apt to reflect as well upon how many
men, all told, have ever heard of his existence or who besides his
grandchildren will remember him a generation hence. He will probably
wish that arithmetic had never been invented. Or if he be one of the
great of earth, he is only one after all, and, if he be in danger of
bursting from inflation, he can be grateful for a timely reminder that
there are several millions on the globe who have never heard of him,
and a few millions more who do not and never will take the faintest
interest in him or his career. But it needs the presence of twenty
centuries to bring the fact of man's individual insignificance home to
most of us."

"She is clever," thought Dartmouth, as he dismissed his brougham
a little later and walked home alone. "Very un-modern and most
reprehensibly unconventional, in so much as she thinks, and develops
her mental muscles; but very charming, notwithstanding. There is an
in