"Oh, your outside was as tranquil as your pride demanded--and it was splendid! But I couldn't help knowing--feeling. A thousand little things appeal so directly to a woman's intuitions." "Indeed! I am delighted to learn that you possess the common intuitions of a woman." "Am I unwomanly? Masculine?" asked Isabel, anxiously. "Not in the ordinary sense; but you are much too strong. No woman should be as strong--as, well--as psychically independent as you are. It is as flagrant a usurpation of prerogative as a pretty complexion on a man." "I only say one prayer: 'Give me strength. Give me strength.'" "For what, in heaven's name? What use have you for so much strength? You have forsworn matrimony. You disclaim the intention of going forth and entering the great battle of the intellects--having, as you say, no talents. You have isolated yourself from love, so you need no uncommon supply of strength to meet suffering. You will always have money enough, and you appear to have been born with the gift of making it. Even if you elect to be the leader of fashion in San Francisco, your equipment need not be of unadulterated steel. But I cannot fancy why you entertain any such ambition." "That is the least of my ambition--although I intend to become the most notable woman in San Francisco, not only because I must gratify a healthy natural ambition in some way, and because I want my life to have a sufficiency of incident in it, but because it is a part of my general scheme." "What is this precious scheme?" "You would not understand if I should tell you. Men have no time for subjectivities--except poets, psychological fictionists, and the like, who do not seem to me men at all. Now, one reason I have liked you from the first, in spite of many things that made my American blood boil, is that you are a man, a real masculine arrogant dense man, with no feminine morbid tendency to analyze your ego, in spite of your Celtic blood. I met too many of that sort in Europe."