It is never a man that I should love, but always the glories he had
won; for they would be reflected upon me.  Think of Richard Burton! 
When I read his wife's life of him I could so understand her love! 
And Lady Stanley!  Did you ever read the wonderful last chapter
of that book about her husband?  These are the sort of men that
a woman could worship with all her soul, and yet be the greater,
not the less, on account of her love, honored by all the world
as the inspirer of noble deeds."

She looked so beautiful in her enthusiasm that I nearly brought
down the whole level of the interview.  I gripped myself hard,
and went on with the argument.

"We can't all be Stanleys and Burtons," said I; "besides, we
don't get the chance,--at least, I never had the chance.  If I
did, I should try to take it."

"But chances are all around you.  It is the mark of the kind of
man I mean that he makes his own chances.  You can't hold him back. 
I've never met him, and yet I seem to know him so well.  There are
heroisms all round us waiting to be done.  It's for men to do them,
and for women to reserve their love as a reward for such men. 
Look at that young Frenchman who went up last week in a balloon. 
It was blowing a gale of wind; but because he was announced to go
he insisted on starting.  The wind blew him fifteen hundred miles
in twenty-four hours, and he fell in the middle of Russia.  That was
the kind of man I mean.  Think of the woman he loved, and how other
women must have envied her!  That's what I should like to be,--envied
for my man."

"I'd have done it to please you."

"But you shouldn't do it merely to please me.  You should do it
because you can't help yourself, because it's natural to you,
because the man in you is crying out for heroic expression. 
Now, when you described the Wigan coal explosion last month,
could you not have gone down and helped those people, in spite
of the choke-damp?"

"I did."

"You never said so."

"There was nothing worth bucking about."

"I didn't know."  She looked at me with rather more interest. 
"That was brave of you."

"I had to.  If you want to write good copy, you must be where the
things are."

"What a prosaic motive!  It seems to take all the romance out
of it.  But, still, whatever your motive, I am glad that you went
down that mine."  She gave me her hand; but with such sweetness
and dignity that I could only stoop and kiss it.  "I dare say I
am merely a foolish woman with a young girl's fancies.  And yet
it is so real with me, so entirely part of my very self, that I
cannot help acting upon it.  If I marry, I do want to marry a
famous man!"

"Why should you not?" I cried.  "It is women like you who brace
men up.  Give me a chance, and see if I will take it!  Besides, as
you say, men ought to MAKE their own chances, and not wait until
they are given.  Look at Clive--just a clerk, and he conquered
India!  By George!  I'll do something in the world yet!"

She laughed at my sudden Irish effervescence.  "Why not?" she said. 
"You have everything a man could have,--youth, health, strength,
education, energy.  I was sorry you spoke.  And now I am glad--so
glad--if it wakens these thoughts in you!"

"And if I do----"

Her dear hand rested like warm velvet upon my lips.  "Not another
word, Sir!  You should have been at the office for evening duty
half an hour ago; only I hadn't the heart to remind you.  Some day,
perhaps, when you have won your place in the world, we shall talk
it over again."

And so it was that I found myself that foggy November evening
pursuing the Camberwell tram with my heart glowing within me, and
with the eager determination that not another day should elapse
before I should find some deed which was worthy of my lady. 
But who--who in all this wide world could ever have imagined the
incredible shape which that deed was to take, or the strange
steps by which I was led to the doing of it?

And, after all, this opening chapter will seem to the reader to
have nothing to do with my narrative; and yet there would have
been no narrative without it, for it is only when a man goes out
into the world with the thought that there are heroisms all round
him, and with the desire all alive in his heart to follow any
which may come within sight of him, that he breaks away as I did
from the life he knows, and ventures forth into the wonderful mystic
twilight land where lie the great adventures and the great rewards. 
Behold me, then, at the office of the Daily Gazette, on the staff
of which I was a most insignificant unit, with the settled
determination that very night, if possible, to find the quest
which should be worthy of my Gladys!  Was it hardness, was it
selfishness, that she should ask me to risk my life for her