As the stage drove on, up one grassy slope and down another, there was quite a different sort of a conversation going on in the other end of the coach.  Charlton found many things which suggested subjects about which he and Miss Minorkey could converse, notwithstanding the strange contrast in their way of expressing themselves.  He was full of eagerness, positiveness, and a fresh-hearted egoism.  He had an opinion on everything; he liked or disliked everything; and when he disliked anything, he never spared invective in giving expression to his antipathy.  His moral convictions were not simply strong—­they were vehement.  His intellectual opinions were hobbies that he rode under whip and spur.  A theory for everything, a solution of every difficulty, a “high moral” view of politics, a sharp skepticism in religion, but a skepticism that took hold of him as strongly as if it had been a faith.  He held to his non credo with as much vigor as a religionist holds to his creed.

Miss Minorkey was just a little irritating to one so enthusiastic.  She neither believed nor disbelieved anything in particular.  She liked to talk about everything in a cool and objective fashion; and Charlton was provoked to find that, with all her intellectual interest in things, she had no sort of personal interest in anything.  If she had been a disinterested spectator, dropped down from another sphere, she could not have discussed the affairs of this planet with more complete impartiality, not to say indifference.  Theories, doctrines, faiths, and even moral duties, she treated as Charlton did beetles; ran pins through them and held them up where she could get a good view of them—­put them away as curiosities.  She listened with an attention that was surely flattering enough, but Charlton felt that he had not made much impression on her.  There was a sort of attraction in this repulsion.  There was an excitement in his ambition to impress this impartial and judicial mind with the truth and importance of the glorious and regenerating views he had embraced.  His self-esteem was pleased at the thought that he should yet conquer this cool and open-minded girl by the force of his own intelligence.  He admired her intellectual self-possession all the more that it was a quality which he lacked.  Before that afternoon ride was over, he was convinced that he sat by the supreme woman of all he had ever known.  And who was so fit to marry the supreme woman as he, Albert Charlton, who was to do so much by advocating all sorts of reforms to help the world forward to its goal?

He liked that word goal.  A man’s pet words are the key to his character.  A man who talks of “vocation,” of “goal,” and all that, may be laughed at while he is in the period of intellectual fermentation.  The time is sure to come, however, when such a man can excite other emotions than mirth.

And so Charlton, full of thoughts of his “vocation” and the world’s “goal,” was slipping into an attachment for a woman to whom both words were Choctaw.  Do you wonder at it?  If she had had a vocation also, and had talked about goals, they would mutually have repelled each other, like two bodies charged with the same kind of electricity.  People with vocations can hardly fall in love with other people with vocations.