not the less, on account of her love, honored by all the world
as the inspirer of noble deeds."

She looked so beautiful in her enthusiasm that I nearly brought
down the whole level of the interview. I gripped myself hard,
and went on with the argument.

"We can't all be Stanleys and Burtons," said I; "besides, we
don't get the chance,--at least, I never had the chance. If I
did, I should try to take it."

"But chances are all around you. It is the mark of the kind of
man I mean that he makes his own chances. You can't hold him back.
I've never met him, and yet I seem to know him so well. There are
heroisms all round us waiting to be done. It's for men to do them,
and for women to reserve their love as a reward for such men.
Look at that young Frenchman who went up last week in a balloon.
It was blowing a gale of wind; but because he was announced to go
he insisted on starting. The wind blew him fifteen hundred miles
in twenty-four hours, and he fell in the middle of Russia. That was
the kind of man I mean. Think of the woman he loved, and how other
women must have envied her! That's what I should like to be,--envied
for my man."

"I'd have done it to please you."

"But you shouldn't do it merely to please me. You should do it
because you can't help yourself, because it's natural to you,
because the man in you is crying out for heroic expression.
Now, when you described the Wigan coal explosion last month,