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 him honestly in the eyes. She had spoken with the soft irony
of truth, the blind tyranny of the just. She had meant to test him here
and there by throwing little darts of satire, and yet he made her serious
and candid in spite of herself. He was of kin to her in some part of his
nature. He did not concern her as a man of personal or social
possibilities--merely as an active originality. Leaning back languidly,
she was eyeing him closely from under drooping lids, smiling, too, in an
unimportant sort of way, as if what she had said was a trifle.
Consummate liar and comedian, or true man and no pretender, his eyes did
not falter. They were absorbed, as if in eager study of a theme.
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