She frowned--just a little frown in the middle of her forehead. She was very well-dressed (which is not a fault), and she had a pleasant, sympathetic, serious face. She said: ‘I’ve often wanted to tell you; in fact, I thought I ought to tell you about all those little books of yours about life and improving oneself, and being efficient and not wasting time, and so on, and so on. They’re very nice to read, but they’ve never done me any good--practically.’ She smiled. (No; it was not to be the usual amiable chatter!) ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘But, of course, books don’t act by themselves. You can’t expect them to be of much practical good until you begin to put them into practice.’ ‘But that’s just the point,’ she answered. ‘I can’t _begin_ to put them into practice. I can’t resolve, and I can’t concentrate, and I can’t clench my teeth and make up my mind. And if I do make a sort of start, it’s a failure after the first day. And this goes on year after year. No use blaming me--I can’t help myself. I want awfully--but I can’t.’ ‘But _what_ do you want?’ ‘I want to make the best of myself. I want to stop wasting time and to perfect my “human machine.” I want to succeed in life. I want to live properly and bring out all my faculties. Only, you see, I haven’t got any resolution. I simply have not got it in me. You tell me to make up my mind, steel myself, resolve, stick to it, and so forth. Well, I just can’t. And yet I do want to. You’ve never dealt with my case--and, what’s more, I don’t think you can deal with it. I hope you’ll pardon all this bluntness. But I thought that, as a student of human nature, you might be interested.’ I stood silent for a moment. She bowed with much charm and fled away. I gazed everywhere. But she was lost in the huge room. I could not very well run in pursuit of her--these things are not done in literary circles. She had vanished. And I knew naught of her. She might be young girl, young wife, young mother, anything--but I knew naught of her except that she had a sympathetic, rather sad face, and that she had left an arrow quivering in my side. II A few hours later, however, I spoke to the young creature as follows: ‘It seems to me that you may have been running your delightful head up against an impossible proposition. Perhaps you have been hoping to _create_ energy in yourself. Now, you cannot create energy, either in yourself or elsewhere. Nobody can. You can only set energy free, loosen it, transform it, direct it.