Now, I asked, what was the next law in art? Henry brought out his paper and read: “Must leave out the unimportant.” “Yes,” I said, “and the next one reads: Must have variety and many-sidedness. Do you understand at all how these apply to life?” “You don’t mean,” asked Marian, “that we are never to do anything unimportant, that we are always to be thinking about it?” “No,” I answered, “certainly not. But I mean that we are to have a definite aim in life, that we are to know what we want most of all. Then we can avoid everything which interferes with this aim. We are to choose the sort of life that will help us to be what we wish to be, that will make us whole and harmonious.” “I don’t know what I want to be,” said Marian. “I don’t think one need have a definite conscious aim.” “You do not quite understand me, Marian,” I answered. “You need not choose now what your profession will be, or what definite thing you want most. Very few people as young as you have done that.” Marian said: “Florence has.” “Florence?” I asked. “She said she loved most to be loved.” “We all do,” said Henry; “to be loved, and to love others.” “I would like,” said Florence, “to dance as well as my dancing teacher.” I expressed grave doubts as to the permanence of this ambition. “But,” I said, “what I mean, Marian, is that you want to be a certain kind of person, that you must have an idea of yourself which, even unconsciously, you try to attain; and it is this ideal, this vision of the self you wish to be, and mean to be, that should color and shape your life, as an artist’s idea of his central figure and meaning controls his whole execution.” “I’m sure I don’t think of it all the time,” she said; “I like just to live along, and dream, and be what I happen to be.” “Now, Marian,” I answered, “you are saying what you think is true. But I will show you that it is not. You live for your desired self, even unconsciously. Do you not remember doing or leaving undone certain little things which your ideal of yourself wanted otherwise, and then reproaching yourself for days for this small lapse into selfishness or unkindness?” They had all had this annoying experience, as well as I myself. Marian told how, when she was quite a small girl, something had happened that she had never forgotten. A little beggar-girl, with only rubbers over her stockings, came to the door and asked Marian for old clothes. Marian had been reading stories, and was longing to act them. But her mother was out, and she had not the courage to do anything; so she turned the child away with a mumbled excuse about her mother’s not being at home. And she had never forgiven herself. Marian saw that what I meant by a definite aim in life was, after all, indefinite enough to suit her.