She looked at him with a curious feeling she had had before; there was something inside of his head that she wanted to get at,--something that baffled and teased and allured her. She wanted to understand him, and she was oppressed by the weight of her ignorance; she had no key to unlock a man like that. With one of her swift impulses she told him of what she was thinking. He smiled, his eyes lighting. "I am more than willing you should know all that you would be curious about," he said. "Ask me a hundred questions; I will answer them." She meditated a moment. She never had taken sufficient interest in a man before to desire to fathom him, and the arts of the Californian belle were not those of the tactfully and impartially interested woman of to-day. She did not know how to begin. "What have you read?" she asked, at length. He gave her some account of his library,--a large one,--and mentioned many books of many nations, of which she had never heard. "You have read all those books?" "There are many long winter nights and days in the redwood forests of the northern coast." "That does not tell me much,--what you have read. I feel that it is but one of the many items which went to the making up of you. You have traveled everywhere, no? Was it like living over again the books of travel?" "Not in the least. Each man travels for himself." "Madame de Staël said that traveling was sad. Is it so?" "To the lover of history it is like food without salt: imagination has painted an historical city with the panorama of a great time; it has been to us a stage for great events. We find it a stage with familiar paraphernalia, and actors as commonplace as ourselves." "It is more satisfactory to stay at home and read about it?" "Infinitely, though less expanding." "Then is anything worth while except reading? "Several things; the pursuit of glory, for one thing, and the active occupied life necessary for its achievement." She leaned forward a little; she felt that she had stumbled nearer to him. "Are you ambitious?" she asked. "For what it compels life to yield; abstractly, not. Ambition is the looting of hell in chase of biting flames swirling above a desert of ashes. As for posthumous fame, it must be about as satisfactory as a draught of ice-water poured down the throat of a man who has died on Sahara. And yet, even if in the end it all means nothing, if 'from hour to hour we ripe and ripe and then from hour to hour we rot and rot,' still for a quarter-century or so the nettle of ambition flagellating our brain may serve to make life less uninteresting and more satisfactory. The abstraction and absorption of the fight, the stinging fear of rivals, the murmur of acknowledgment, the shout of compelled applause,--they fill the blanks." "Tell me," she said, imperiously, "what do you want?"