t."

"You can answer that yourself, Jim. She's far from it: you and I are not
saint-worshippers. But she has it in her to be a saint, if her attention
and her latent force were turned that way. She can be anything, or do
anything. She hasn't found her life yet. She bides her time, and I wait
with her. Her wings will sprout some day. I like her well enough as she
is."

"Evidently. Do you know, old man, that you are talking very freely?"

"Am I the first? or do you suppose I would say all this to any chance
comer? You opened your soul to me in May, as far as you knew it: you are
welcome to see into mine now."

"There is a difference. I cared for nothing, and believed in nothing; so
my soul was worth little. Yours is that of a prosperous and happy man."

"Externals are not the measure of the soul, Jim, nor yet creeds. I know
a gentleman when I see him, and so do you. Your soul will get its food
yet, and assume its full stature; you've been trying to starve it
partly, that's all."

"Do you talk this way to your Princess, Bob?"

"No. She is younger than we: why should I bore her? You and I are on
equal terms: she and I are not."

"This humility is very chivalric, but I don't quite understand it in
you, Bob."

"You can't: you've been so long unused to women, and you never knew one
like her. If you had, it would have been too early; what does a boy of
twenty know of himself, or of the girls he thinks he is in love with, or
of the true relations that should exist between him and them? Call it
quixotic if you like; I don't mind. Any gentleman, that is, any
spiritual man, has it in him to be a Quixote. When you come to know
Clarice, you will understand."

"Do you call yourself and me spiritual men, Bob?"

"Yes; why not? Spirituality does not depend on the opinions one chances
to hold, but on the view he takes of his own part in Life, and on the
inherent nature of his soul. We are not worshippers of mammon, or
fashion, or any of the idols of the tribe. I live in the world, and you
out of it; but that makes little difference. You were in danger of
becoming a dogmatist, but you are too much of a man for that. We both
live to learn, and we can spend ourselves on an adequate object when we
find it."

"Bob, if you don't talk to her like this, she doesn't know you as I do."

"No human being knows another exactly as a third does. We strike fire at
different points--when we do at all, which is seldom--and show different
s