“Yes, I comprehend; and so you choose to write in fragments?”
“No, I don’t choose to do it in the sense you mean; choosing from a whole world of professions, all possible. It was by the constraint of accident merely. Not that I object to the accident.”
“Why don’t you object—I mean, why do you feel so quiet about things?” Elfride was half afraid to question him so, but her intense curiosity to see what the inside of literary Mr. Knight was like, kept her going on.
Knight certainly did not mind being frank with her. Instances of this trait in men who are not without feeling, but are reticent from habit, may be recalled by all of us. When they find a listener who can by no possibility make use of them, rival them, or condemn them, reserved and even suspicious men of the world become frank, keenly enjoying the inner side of their frankness.
“Why I don’t mind the accidental constraint,” he replied, “is because, in making beginnings, a chance limitation of direction is often better than absolute freedom.”
“I see—that is, I should if I quite understood what all those generalities mean.”
“Why, this: That an arbitrary foundation for one’s work, which no length of thought can alter, leaves the attention free to fix itself on the work itself, and make the best of it.”
“Lateral compression forcing altitude, as would be said in that tongue,” she said mischievously. “And I suppose where no limit exists, as in the case of a rich man with a wide taste who wants to do something, it will be better to choose a limit capriciously than to have none.”
“Yes,” he said meditatively. “I can go as far as that.”
“Well,” resumed Elfride, “I think it better for a man’s nature if he does nothing in particular.”
“There is such a case as being obliged to.”
“Yes, yes; I was speaking of when you are not obliged for any other reason than delight in the prospect of fame. I have thought many times lately that a thin widespread happiness, commencing now, and of a piece with the days of your life, is preferable to an anticipated heap far away in the future, and none now.”
“Why, that’s the very thing I said just now as being the principle of all ephemeral doers like myself.”
“Oh, I am sorry to have parodied you,” she said with some confusion. “Yes, of course. That is what you meant about not trying to be famous.” And she added, with the quickness of conviction characteristic of her mind: “There is much littleness in trying to be great. A man must think a good deal of himself, and be conceited enough to believe in himself, before he tries at all.”
“But it is soon enough to say there is harm in a man’s thinking a good deal of himself when it is proved he has been thinking wrong, and too soon then sometimes. Besides, we should not conclude that a man who strives earnestly for success does so with a strong sense of his own merit. He may see how little success has to do with merit, and his motive may be his very humility.”
This manner of treating her rather provoked Elfride. No sooner did she agree with him than he ceased to seem to wish it, and took the other side. “Ah,” she thought inwardly, “I shall have nothing to do with a man of this kind, though he is our visitor.”
“I think you will find,” resumed Knight, pursuing the conversation more for the sake of finishing off his thoughts on the subject than for engaging her attention, “that in actual life it is merely a matter of instinct with men—this trying to push on. They awake to a recognition that they have, without premeditation, begun to try a little, and they say to themselves, ‘Since I have tried thus much, I will try a little more.’ They go on because they have begun.”
Elfride, in her turn, was not particularly attending to his words at this moment. She had, unconsciously to herself, a way of seizing any point in the remarks of an interlocutor which interested her, and dwelling upon it, and thinking thoughts of her own thereupon, totally oblivious of all that he might say in continuation. On such occasions she artlessly surveyed the person speaking; and then there was a time for a painter. Her eyes seemed to look at you, and past you, as you were then, into your future; and past your future into your eternity—not reading it, but gazing in an unused, unconscious way—her mind still clinging to its original thought.
This is how she was looking at Knight.
Suddenly Elfride became conscious of what she was doing, and was painfully confused.
“What were you so intent upon in me?” he inquired.
“As far as I was thinking of you at all, I was thinking how clever you are,” she said, with a want of premeditation that was startling in its honesty and simplicity.
Feeling restless now that she had so unwittingly spoken, she arose and stepped to the window, having heard the voices of her father and Mrs. Swancourt coming up below the terrace. “Here they are,” she said, going out. Knight walked out upon the lawn behind her. She stood upon the edge of the terrace, close to the stone balustrade, and looked towards the sun, hanging over
