He has the impassioned temperament, pushed to its highest pitch; the temperament that runs deep, with irresistible force; but the passion that inspires him, that carries him away headlong, as love carries some men, is a rare and abstract one--the passion of science." I gazed at her as she spoke, with a feeling akin to awe.

"It must destroy the plot-interest of life for you, Hilda," I cried--out there in the vast void of that wild African plateau--"to foresee so well what each person will do--how each will act under such given circumstances." She pulled a bent of grass and plucked off its dry spikelets one by one.

"Perhaps so," she answered, after a meditative pause; "though, of course, all natures are not equally simple.

Only with great souls can you be sure beforehand like that, for good or for evil.

It is essential to anything worth calling character that one should be able to predict in what way it will act under given circumstances--to feel certain, 'This man will do nothing small or mean,' 'That one could never act dishonestly, or speak deceitfully.' But smaller natures are more complex.