'On the contrary, it's her unselfconsciousness that's the most surprising thing about her. Or, no! It's something more interesting even than that. She is conscious, in a way, of the hold she has on the public. But it hasn't any of the deteriorating effect you were deprecating. I've been moved once or twice to congratulate her. She takes it as unmoved as a child. It's just as if you said to a little thing of three, "What a clever baby you are!" or, "You've got the most beautiful eyes in the world." The child would realize that you meant well, that you were being pleasant, but it wouldn't think about either its cleverness or its eyes. It's like that with Ernestine. When I said to her, "You made an astoundingly good speech to-night. The best I've heard even you make," she looked at me with a sort of half-absent-minded, half-wondering expression, without a glimmer of personal vanity. When I was so ill-advised as not to drop the subject, when I ventured to say something more about that great gift of hers, she interrupted me with a little laugh, "It's a sign of grace in you not to get tired of our speeches," she said. "I suppose we repeat ourselves a good deal. You see that's just what we've got to do. We've got to _hammer it in_." But the fact is that she doesn't repeat herself, that she's always fresh and stimulating, because--I suppose it's because she's always thinking of the Great Impersonal Object, and talking about it out of her own eager heart. Ernestine? She's as unhackneyed as a spring morning!' 'Oh, very well. I'll go.' 'Go? Where?' for he still sat there. 'Why, to hear your paragon. I've seen that was what you were leading up to.' 'N--no. I don't think I want you to go.' 'Oh, yes, you do. I knew you'd make me sooner or later.' 'No, don't be afraid.' She stood up. 'I'm not afraid. I'm eager,' he laughed. She shook her head. 'No, I'll never take you.' 'Why not?' 'Because--it isn't all Ernestine and skittles. And because you'd make me keenly alive again to all sorts of things that I see now don't matter--things that have lost some of their power to trouble me, but that I should feel for you.' 'What sort of----' 'Oh, oddities, uglinesses--things that abound, I'm told, at all men's meetings, and that yet, somehow, we'd like to eliminate from women's quite on the old angel theory. No, I won't take you!' CHAPTER XIII