I don't know what I am capable of doing.

I wish I knew; I wish I could tell you." "Do you know what I think, Shiela ?" "What ?" "It's curious--but since I have known you--and about your birth--the idea took shape and persisted--that--that--" "What ?" she asked.
"That, partly perhaps because of your physical beauty, and because of your mind and its intelligence and generosity, you embodied something of that type which this nation is developing." "That is curious," she said softly.
"Yes; but you give me that impression, as though in you were the lovely justification of these generations of welding together alien and native to make a national type, spiritual, intelligent, wholesome, beautiful....

And I've fallen into the habit of thinking of you in that way--as thoroughly human, thoroughly feminine, heir to the best that is human, and to its temptations too; yet, somehow, instinctively finding the right way in life, the true way through doubt and stress....

Like the Land itself--with perhaps the blood of many nations in your veins....

I don't know exactly what I'm trying to say--" "_I_ know." "Yes," he whispered, "you do know that all I have said is only a longer way of saying that I love you." "Through stress and doubt," she murmured, "you think I will find the way ?--with perhaps the blood of many nations in my veins, with all their transmitted emotions, desires, passions for my inheritance ?...