o asphyxiate myself, have strings tied to my arms and legs
like a damned marionette. I wasn't willing to be bored for any reward
they had to offer me. It's cynical to be bored. It's the worst
immorality there is. Well, and I never have been."

It wasn't all autobiographical and narrative. There was a lot of his
deep-breathing, spacious philosophy of life mixed up in it. And this the
girl, consciously, and deliberately, provoked. It didn't need much. She
said something about discipline and he snatched the word away from her.

"What is discipline? Why, it's standing the gaff--_standing_ it, not
submitting to it. It's accepting the facts of life--of your own life, as
they happen to be. It isn't being conquered by them. It's not making
masters of them, but servants to the underlying things you want."

She tried to make a reservation there--suppose the things you wanted
weren't good things.

But he wouldn't allow it.

"Whatever they are," he insisted, "your desires are the only motive
forces you've got. No matter how fine your intelligence is, it can't
ride anywhere except on the backs of your own passions. There's no good
lamenting that they're not different, and it's silly to beat them to
death and make a merit of not having ridden anywhere because they might
have carried you into trouble. Learn to ride them--control them--spur
them. But don't forget that they're _you_ just as essentially as the
rider is."

It was with a curiously relaxed body, her chin cradled in the crook of
her arm that lay along the back of the couch, her eyes unfocused on the
window, that the girl listened to it.

Primarily, indeed, she wasn't exactly listening. Much of the narrative
went by almost unheard. Much of the philosophy she hardly tried to
understand. What was constantly present and more and more poignantly
vivid with every five minutes that ticked away on the banjo clock, was a
consciousness of the man himself, the driving power of him, the
boisterous health and freshness and confidence. She was conscious, too,
of something formidable--carelessly exultant in his own strength. She
got to thinking of the flight of a great bird wheeling up higher and
higher on his powerful wings.

He had caught her up, too, and was carrying her to altitudes far beyond
her own powers. He might drop her, but if he did, it wouldn't be through
weakness. At what he said about riding on the backs of one's own
passions, her imagination varied the picture so