He went on, in his vibrating heart-stirring whisper, to speak of the South Pole. She had divined--as it seemed, long ago--that this was his ultimate goal, the glorious hope of his life’s work. Dyke meant, had always meant, to capture the South Pole, and all other tasks were but a filling or wasting of time. He had marked it down as his own. He spoke of it as if it had been some dangerous yet timid animal of the chase, round which he had made narrowing circles till it crouched fascinated, unable any more to flee from its pursuer; it knew that it could not escape and that when Dyke ceased to circle and dashed in, it must fall into his hands.
“Remember, Emmie, I’m not all talk; I’m do as well. Yes, Dyke will do things”; and his blue eyes flashed at her, and the colour came to those high cheek-bones as if the tea was beginning not only to cheer but to intoxicate. “If they won’t support me--if they won’t fit me out in the style I ask for--if they won’t give me the ship I want--Then in a sieve I’ll thither sail, and like a rat without a tail, I’ll do, I’ll do, I’ll do. No, you don’t know me yet, Emmie. You don’t know me yet.”
But already how well she knew him! Better perhaps than he knew himself. She knew that behind all the courage which for so long had made him hold his life at a pin’s fee; behind the insatiable curiosity, the love of adventure, the fiery challenge to the universe that form the very substance of a true explorer’s mental constitution;--behind all that there was the unslumbering desire for personal fame. If only by his little individual trick of speaking of himself in the third person--“That’s not good enough for Dyke”; “Anthony Dyke has other plans”; and so on--she would have known so much as this. Habitually, during all those enforced silences that had made up his active career, he had listened to the imagined voices of the world thinking about him; and now he could not think of himself in relation to fame without, as it were, standing for a moment outside himself. Dyke wanted the South Pole; but Dyke wanted the undying fame of getting it. Why not? The labourer is worthy of his hire. She felt that she need not class his ambition--the last infirmity of noble minds--as even one slight defect of his innumerable glorious qualities.