Alfred flushed slightly. He wasn't entirely sure how to respond to that, and he felt like any response he did give would seem just as inadequate as his stumbling attempt to explain why he was sailing off in search of King Arthur. He wasn't very good at articulating things. Except that he was fine at it when he had practiced the lines, as with his fundraising over the prior months; he just wasn't good at articulating anything that mattered.

He was not used to being envied for his passion regarding his career, or for anything, really. He'd stumbled into the nautical realm more or less by chance, after meeting his old Captain at a career fair when he had been a shiftless youth. He'd been seventeen at the time, with no particular direction and nothing tying him down, and although the Captain's vigor had convinced him to join up he hadn't really developed his love of the sea (or of being abroad generally) until much later. He couldn't have placed a pin in the moment that it happened, honestly, so how was he supposed to describe it to her?

The other thing that nagged at him was that she seemed so sure that there was some sort of chasm between what he did and what she did, and he wasn't comfortable with being placed, for any reason, on that sort of pedestal. She couldn't possibly be much older than he had been when he'd first joined the Navy, so it was hardly as though she was running out of time to find something she cared about.

"You will, I bet," he told her quietly. "It takes time. And even after that, it takes time to realize it."