After a short silence, Sir Roger said: "Miss Earl, I can find no triumph written on your features, and I doubt whether you realize how very proud your friends are of your success."
"As yet, sir, it is not assured. My next book will determine my status in literature; and I have too much to accomplish--I have achieved too little, to pause and look back, and pat my own shoulder, and cry, Io triumphe! I am not so indifferent as you seem to imagine. Praise gratifies, and censure pains me; but I value both as mere gauges of my work, indexing the amount of good I may or may not hope to effect. I wish to be popular--that is natural, and, surely, pardonable; but I desire it not as an end, but as a means to an end--usefulness to my fellow-creatures; 'And whether crowned or crownless, when I fall, It matters not, so as God's work is done.'
I love my race, I honor my race; I believe that human nature, sublimated by Christianity, is capable of attaining nobler heights than pagan philosophers and infidel seers ever dreamed of. And because my heart yearns toward my fellow-creatures, I want to clasp one hand in the warm throbbing palm of sinful humanity, and with the other hold up the lamp that God gave me to carry through this world, and so struggle onward, heavenward, with this generation of men and women. I claim no clear Uriel vision, now and then I stumble and grope; but at least I try to keep my little lamp trimmed, and I am not so blind as some, who reel and stagger in the Maremme of crime and fashionable vice. As a pilgrim toiling through a world of sinful temptation, and the night of time where the stars are often shrouded, I cry to those beyond and above me, 'Hold high your lights, that I may see my way!' and to those behind and below me, 'Brothers! sisters! come on, come up!' Ah! these steeps of human life are hard enough to climb when each shares his light and divides his neighbor's grievous burden. God help us all to help one another! Mecca pilgrims stop in the Valley of Muna to stone the Devil; sometimes I fear that in the Muna of life we only stone each other and martyr Stephen. Last week I read a lecture on architecture, and since then I find myself repeating one of the passages: 'And therefore, lastly and chiefly, you must love the creatures to whom you minister, your fellow-men; for if you do not love them, not only will you be little interested in the passing events of life, but in all your gazing at humanity, you will be apt to be struck only by outside form, and not by expression. It is only kindness and tenderness which will ever enable you to see what beauty there is in the dark eyes that are sunk with weeping, and in the paleness of those fixed faces which the earth's adversity has compassed about, till they shine in their patience like dying watch-fires through twilight.' In some sort I think we are all mechanics--moral architects, designing as apprentices on the sands of time that which, as master builders, we shall surely erect on the jasper pavements of eternity. So let us all heed the noble words."