"
"Oh, come now! At my age! Why, any possibilities are over, except for a
cheerful kind of vegetating."
"You have vegetated all your life, I can see that. No one has ever waked
you. You have hardly _used_ your soul at all. It's with you as it is with
your country, whose life is built strongly and sanely with body and brain
but who has not felt nationally, as a whole, its spirit. Like it, you have
a spirit; like it, you are full of possibilities."
"Miss Upton, you aren't like anybody I've ever known. What sort of
possibilities?"
She walked on now, feeling his thrill echo in herself, symptomatic of the
passing forth of power and its return as enrichment of life and inspiration
to helpfulness. "Of service," she said. "Of devotion to great needs;
courage in great causes. I don't think that you have ever had a chance."
Sir Basil, keeping his eyes on her straight, pale profile, groping and
confused in this new flood of light, wondered if he had.
"You are an extraordinary young woman," he said at last. "You make me
believe in everything you say, though it's so awfully queer, you know, to
think in that way about myself. If you talk to me often like this, about
needs and causes, will it give me more of a chance, do you think?"
"We must all win to the light for ourselves," said Imogen very gently, "but
we can help one another."
They had come now to the edge of the wood and out upon the white road that
curved from the village up to the blue of the hills they had descended.
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