‘‘ ‘It costs me nothing to do it, but I won’t do it for nothing.’ In the dark, she laughed vaguely and spat repeatedly. ‘I’m the key person, aren’t I? If I am persuaded, you can get everything you want. Both of us know this. I’m not a beauty, but I have enormous energy. My cousin knows this best. It’s no exaggeration to say that he admires me greatly. Just think, after forty years, he’s now an old man, and yet that incident remains fresh in his mind. Can ordinary people remember the past so well? I meditate on this subject from time to time, and I’m astonished at my ability. I see clearly that I can get anything I want. I was born with this omnipotence. Still, I always take the high road: I don’t want to contend for fame and fortune. After I left the meeting tonight, I knew you’d come to see me. It wouldn’t do any good for you to see others, but seeing me, you can get everything you want. What kind of person am I? Can anyone compare with me? Do you understand what I mean now? You’re a stenographer who can at any time write about big events and about people who are characterized by individuality and charm. To you, the most important thing is to have the eyes to penetrate everything. You have to look upon the people around you with far-sighted eyes and analyze which people are worth recording and which are merely a flash in the pan who won’t amount to anything. You shouldn’t choose only the young and beautiful. More often than not, age is directly proportionate to charm. You’ll learn this from experience. In this place, there are some persons of the hour who don’t possess profound genius. They might attract a lot of attention because they’re superficially active, but their hearts are absolute voids. These counterfeits can sometimes pull the wool over the eyes of young people like you, and-on an impulse-you might want to write them into history as heroes. If you do that, they would really start pushing society blindly, and so the entire course of history would slip-all because of your devil-may-care mistake. We can see from this the heavy responsibilities you stenographers must assume- how essential it is for a judicious person with abundant experience to guide you so that you’ll make fewer mistakes. Is it possible that these nameless heroes who work in silence, these people who are humble and cautious on the surface and don’t say much, don’t go out much, and yet actually have astonishing abilities-is it possible that they aren’t more worthy of being written into history than these phonies? Since you’re engaged in this work, why haven’t you noticed these worthy people all around you? Why haven’t you shown great interest in them and pursued them? This is you young stenographers’ biggest disadvantage. If a person doesn’t notice his limitations when he’s young and doesn’t have a cultural forebear (sometimes this cultural forebear and the worthy person are identical) to provide prudent guidance, his latent genius will unconsciously slip away, and in the end, he will have wasted his life and accomplished nothing. Nothing in his entire life will be worth remembering. You don’t run into worthy people all the time. Sometimes, in several centuries there’s only one. The issue is whether you have keen enough eyesight to identify them at first glance. You also need luck. When they have just come to your side and modestly offered to guide you, you might not listen if you lack talent. You will probably think that’s just boasting. But if you’re a genius, you’ll respond strongly, just like falling in love at first sight.’
