e weapon of amusement, flickering through absolute calm. He
suddenly wished that she were younger. He had never given a thought to
her age before, but he remembered that she had lived for two years
longer than himself, and it made him feel even less than thirty.

"My dear boy," she said, wonderingly, "I never heard anything so
romantic and impossible. Of course it is the American cousin with whom
you have been shut up all these weeks that has been putting such
preposterous ideas into your head. I always said that nature just missed
making you a poet. But if you wish to work out your manifest destiny--to
be immortalized in history--you will remind yourself that England is the
one place on earth where an Anglo-Saxon can cut a really great figure.
Not only because he has the proper background of traditions, but because
he has an audience trained to recognize a man's greatness during his
lifetime. If you go in for those unspeakable American politics you will
never be given credit for anything higher than your medium; in other
words, should you develop into a statesman on American lines you would
never be recognized for anything but a successful politician. Even if
you survived in their hurly-burly of history, you would be judged by
contemporary standards--infused with a certain contempt because you were
not American-born."

"I have thought it all out. The obstacles to greatness, even more than
to success, have whetted my appetite for the struggle. I must fight!
fight! fight! I must exercise my powers of usefulness to some good end,
and now, now, when I am young and ardent. I should go mad sitting round
doing nothing. I have no temper for attacking the passive resistance of
inertia. I want to fight out in the open. If I fail I will take my
beating like a man. But I have not the least intention of failing. I am
acutely aware of the powers within me, and I can use them anywhere."

"Then why not in the Upper House?" she asked, quickly.

"For the reasons I have given you, and because I should fear the results
on my character. You know what it means to be a peer of Great Britain.
Flattery without accomplishment is demoralizing--would be to me, at all
events. It is wine to me when I am achieving, but it would drug me in
idleness. Are you so wedded to London?"

"London is the _raison d'etre_ of life. Has it occurred to you," she
asked, gently, "that I might refuse to go to America?"

"I was afraid the idea would be something o