The information he sought might have been for more than satisfaction of wounded vanity.

Youth is but the painted shell within which, continually growing, lives that wondrous thing the spirit of man, biding its moment of apparition, earlier in some than in others.

She trembled under a perception that this might be the supreme moment come to him; that as children at birth reach out their untried hands grasping for shadows, and crying the while, so his spirit might, in temporary blindness, be struggling to take hold of its impalpable future.

They to whom a boy comes asking, Who am I, and what am I to be?
have need of ever so much care.

Each word in answer may prove to the after-life what each finger-touch of the artist is to the clay he is modelling.
"I have a feeling, O my Judah," she said, patting his cheek with the hand he had been caressing--"I have the feeling that all I have said has been in strife with an antagonist more real than imaginary.