ll squared?" she interrupted quizzically.

"As the Great Emperor said," he answered. "A woman sees farther than
a man, and if she has judgment as well, she is the best prophet in the
world."

"It sounds distinctly like a compliment," she answered. "You are trying
to break that square!"

She was mystified; he was different from any man she had ever
entertained. She was not half sure she liked it. Yet, if he were in very
truth a prince--she thought of his debut in flowered waistcoat,
panama hat, and enamelled boots!--she should take this confidence as a
compliment; if he were a barber, she could not resent it; she could not
waste wit or time; she could not even, in extremity, call the servant to
show the barber out; and in any case she was too comfortably interested
to worry herself with speculation.

He was very much in earnest. "I want to ask you," he said, "what is the
thing most needed to make a great idea succeed."

"I have never had a great idea," she replied.

He looked at her eagerly, with youthful, questioning eyes.

"How simple, and yet how astute he is!" she thought, remembering the
event of yesterday.

"I thought you had--I was sure you had," he said in a troubled sort of
way. He did not see that she was eluding him.

"I mean, I never had a fixed and definite idea that I proceeded to
apply, as you have done," she explained tentatively. "But--well, I
suppose that the first requisite for success is absolute belief in the
idea; that it be part of one's life; to suffer for, to fight for, to die
for, if need be--though that sounds like a handbook of moral mottoes,
doesn't it?"

"That's it, that's it," he said. "The thing must be in your
bones--hein?"

"Also in--your blood--hein?" she rejoined slowly and meaningly, looking
over the top of her coffee-cup at him. Somehow again the plebeian
quality in that hein grated on her, and she could not resist the retort.

"What!" said he confusedly, plunging into another pitfall. She had
challenged him, and he knew it. "Nothing what-ever," she answered, with
an urbanity that defied the suggestion of malice. Yet, now that she
remembered, she had sweetly challenged one of a royal house for the like
lapse into the vulgar tongue. A man should not be beheaded because of a
what. So she continued more seriously: "The idea must be himself, all of
him, born with him, the rightful output of his own nature, the thing he
must inevitably do, or waste his life."

She looked