"When my own life feels small, and I am oppressed with it, I like to crush together, and see it in a picture, in an instant, a multitude of disconnected unlike phases of human life--a mediaeval monk with his string of beads pacing the quiet orchard, and looking up from the grass at his feet to the heavy fruit-trees; little Malay boys playing naked on a shining sea-beach; a Hindoo philosopher alone under his banyan tree, thinking, thinking, thinking, so that in the thought of God he may lose himself; a troop of Bacchanalians dressed in white, with crowns of vine-leaves, dancing along the Roman streets; a martyr on the night of his death looking through the narrow window to the sky, and feeling that already he has the wings that shall bear him up" (she moved her hand dreamily over her face); "an epicurean discoursing at a Roman bath to a knot of his disciples on the nature of happiness; a Kaffer witchdoctor seeking for herbs by moonlight, while from the huts on the hillside come the sound of dogs barking, and the voices of women and children; a mother giving bread-and-milk to her children in little wooden basins and singing the evening song.

I like to see it all; I feel it run through me--that life belongs to me; it makes my little life larger, it breaks down the narrow walls that shut me in." She sighed, and drew a long breath.
"Have you made any plans ?" she asked him presently.
"Yes," he said, the words coming in jets, with pauses between; "I will take the grey mare--I will travel first--I will see the world--then I will find work." "What work ?" "I do not know." She made a little impatient movement.
"That is no plan; travel--see the world--find work! If you go into the world aimless, without a definite object, dreaming--dreaming, you will be definitely defeated, bamboozled, knocked this way and that.

In the end you will stand with your beautiful life all spent, and nothing to show.

They talk of genius--it is nothing but this, that a man knows what he can do best, and does it, and nothing else.

Waldo," she said, knitting her little fingers closer among his, "I wish I could help you; I wish I could make you see that you must decide what you will be and do.