ceptable down here -- Wait! I'll change that.
In the qualities which would make one acceptable
to me you are lacking to a very considerable degree.
And it is just there that you fill me with
the greatest doubt -- doubt so grave, indeed, that
I cannot -- and I use the verb advisedly -- cannot
permit myself to like you in the way you want
me to like you."

Again he bestirred himself. "What is that,
please? What is that quality?"

"I have tried to tell you," she rejoined, patiently.
"It is a really worth-while ambition.
You lack the desire to do something, the desire
to be something -- a desire that ought to have
been yours, should have been yours, years ago -- the
thing part and parcel of our blood down here.
It may take shape in any one of a hundred different
things -- business ventures; personal prospectings;
pursuit of art, science; raising cattle -- anything,
Stephen! But something, something
which will develop a real value, both to yourself
and to your fellow-man. We have it. We have
inherited it. We got it from our grandfathers -- our
great-grandfathers, in a few cases -- men who
wanted to know -- to learn -- to learn by doing.
It is a powerful force. It must be a powerful
force, it must have been strong within them, for
it dragged them out of the comforts of civilization
and led them into the desert. But they found
what they sought; and in finding what they
sought they found themselves also. And what
they found--"

[[138]]

p137 _ -chap- _ toc-1 _ p138w _ toc-2 _ +chap+ _ p139

v?