"I want to ask you," he said, "what is the thing most needed to make a great idea succeed." "I have never had a great idea," she replied.
He looked at her eagerly, with youthful, questioning eyes.
"How simple, and yet how astute he is!" she thought, remembering the event of yesterday.
"I thought you had--I was sure you had," he said in a troubled sort of way.

He did not see that she was eluding him.
"I mean, I never had a fixed and definite idea that I proceeded to apply, as you have done," she explained tentatively.

"But--well, I suppose that the first requisite for success is absolute belief in the idea; that it be part of one's life; to suffer for, to fight for, to die for, if need be--though that sounds like a handbook of moral mottoes, doesn't it ?" "That's it, that's it," he said.

"The thing must be in your bones--hein ?" "Also in--your blood--hein ?" she rejoined slowly and meaningly, looking over the top of her coffee-cup at him.

Somehow again the plebeian quality in that hein grated on her, and she could not resist the retort.
"What!" said he confusedly, plunging into another pitfall.