"Well, I do. I'd do anything for a person that I had seen cry; I would really." Felicia opened her large hazel eyes still wider. "What a strange idea! It seems to me that you think too much about feelings and not enough about principles." "But thinking about feelings makes you think about principles; feelings are the only things that ever make me think about principles at all." After a few minutes' silence Elisabeth asked suddenly: "What do you mean to do with your life when you leave here and take it up?" "I don't know. I suppose I shall fall in love and get married. Most girls do. And I hope it will be with a clergyman, for I do so love parish work." "I don't think I want to get married," said Elisabeth slowly, "not even to a clergyman." "How queer of you! Why not?" "Because I want to paint pictures and to become a great artist. I feel there is such a lot in me that I want to say, and that I must say; and I can only say it by means of pictures. It would be dreadful to die before you had delivered the message that you had been sent into the world to deliver, don't you think?" "It would be more dreadful to die before you had found one man to whom you would be everything, and who would be everything to you," replied Felicia. "Oh! I mean to fall in love, because everybody does, and I hate to be behindhand with things; but I shall do it just as an experience, to make me paint better pictures. I read in a book the other day that you must fall in love before you can become a true artist; so I mean to do so. But it won't be as important to me as my art," said Elisabeth, who was as yet young enough to be extremely wise. "Still, it must be lovely to know there is one person in the world to whom you can tell all your thoughts, and who will understand them, and be interested in them." "It must be far lovelier to know that you have the power to tell all your thoughts to the whole world, and that the world will understand them and be interested in them," Elisabeth persisted. "I don't think so. I should like to fall in love with a man who was so much better than I, that I could lean on him and learn from him in everything; and I should like to feel that whatever goodness or cleverness there was in me was all owing to him, and that I was nothing by myself, but everything with him." "I shouldn't. I should like to feel that I was so good and clever that I was helping the man to be better and cleverer even than he was before." "I should like all my happiness and all my interest to centre in that one particular man," said Felicia; "and to feel that he was a fairy prince, and that I was a poor beggar-maid, who possessed nothing but his love."