And it is much the same no matter what sort of ascendency is exercised over us; there is always excitement and a feeling of newness and uncertainty, imagination is awakened and busies itself with the fascinating personality; his slightest word or action is eagerly interpreted and works upon us. In short, mystery and idealism are so inseparable that a sense of power in others seems to involve a sense of their inscrutability; and, on the other hand, so soon as a person becomes plain, he ceases to stimulate the imagination; we have seen all around him, so that he no longer appears an open door to new life, but has begun to be commonplace and stale. It is even true that inscrutability in itself, having perhaps nothing important back of it, plays a considerable part in personal ascendency. The hero is always a product of constructive imagination; and just as some imaginative painters find that the too detailed observation of sensible objects cumbers the inner vision and impedes production, so the hero-worshipper is likely at times to reject altogether the persons he knows in favor of some sort of mask or lay figure, whose very blankness or inertness insures to it the great advantage that it cannot actively repudiate the qualities attributed to it: it offers _carte blanche_ to the imagination. As already suggested, the vital question in ascendency is not, primarily, What are you? but, What do you enable me to be? What self-developing ideas do you enable me to form? and the power of mere inscrutability arises from the fact that it gives a vague stimulus to thought and then leaves it to work out the details to suit itself. To recur to the matter of falling in love: the young girl who, like Gwendolen in “Daniel Deronda,” or Isabel in the “Portrait of a Lady,” fixes her passion upon some self-contained and to her inscrutable person, in preference to others who are worthier but less mysterious, is a common character in life as well as in fiction.