Page:The Sense of the Past (London, W. Collins Sons & Co., 1917).djvu/47

 research, curiosity, passion, the historic passion, as you called it, helping you. From that moment," she went on, "I saw. The sense of the past is your sense."

He attended with a cold eye. "I haven't an idea what trash I may have talked."

"Don't be dishonest," she returned after a moment.

It brought, almost as a blow, a flush to his cheek. "Dishonest?"

"Don't deny yourself. Don't deny your ambition. Don't deny your genius."

He looked at her over it strangely, and then as if light had really broken, "Are those things what you hate me for?" he almost gasped.

"Live up to them," she returned as if she had not heard him. "You won't do anything else." She said it with a shortness that was almost stern, and he felt, detestably, as if she had but one moment instructed and at the other derided him. "Isn't that moreover quite the lesson of the chance, the one you just mentioned, of what you may come in for? Isn't an old property for you the very finger of fortune, the very 'lead' of providence? Profit for heaven's sake by your old property. It will open your eyes." She went on with widened looks which so further ennobled her face that they held him by themselves, standing out as he did from any truth in them. "That's what your little book itself says—your little book 33