"As to the right groove, I don't know that this particular one is better for me than any other in which there would be earnest work to do in which I could take a hearty interest. Certainly I have come to find a degree of interest in what I am now doing that could surprise no one more than it does myself." "You ought to be in Parliament yourself, Mr. Pomeroy, instead of filling the anomalous position you do now." "One must learn to creep before one can walk," said Gerald, with a shrug. "But some people never get beyond creeping.----If I were a man, I should certainly strive to get into Parliament," added Eleanor, a minute or two later. "How easy it is for a man to have a noble ambition!" "Then you like a man to be ambitious?" "I could certainly never look up to anyone who was not so." "I am afraid that you aim your arrow too high for these commonplace days. There are many kinds of ambition that a man may occupy himself with, and yet none of them may be really ignoble: Sir Thomas Dudgeon's, for instance. It is his ambition to breed superior sheep and oxen--and it is decidedly for our benefit that he should do so. I have a friend in Paris who has a crippled sister, and the object of his ambition is the invention of an invalid's chair that shall be superior to any other. These are not large ambitions, but they are certainly very laudable ones." "If you know the object of a man's ambition, cannot you from that gauge, to a certain extent at least, the quality of his mind?" "Undoubtedly you can, to a certain extent, as you say. But there are many men who keep their ambitious dreams to themselves as closely as they do their bankbook. When such a man dies, the general verdict is that he might have succeeded very much better in life if he had only had a little more ambition, whereas the probability is that he succeeded so ill because he had too much ambition." "I hardly follow you," said Eleanor. "Let us say that such a man's ambition was to stand on the topmost pinnacle of the Jungfrau; and because he felt that he had neither the strength nor the skill requisite to carve his way step by step to the summit, rather than content himself with any lesser altitude, he preferred to sit quietly down, dumb and disappointed, among the ignoble crowd at the bottom."