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."