And to find it out
here in this stranded city--that fascinates the very heart out of you,
by-the-way--I don't know that I wonder so much--I believe I shall
succumb myself in time--it is like being on another planet. At any rate
I hated myself to-night for any sickness of spirit I may have permitted
to linger--for a while my very personality seemed to melt into what may
prove an even greater cause than all that appears on the surface. The
present California may be merely the nucleus of a great future Western
civilization, so unlike the Eastern that no doubt it will dissever
itself in time and breed still wider divergences; until the old
generic term American will no longer apply to both. Moreover, it
already feels that it owns the Pacific, and faces the Orient alone.
And to rebuild this city--you have seen the Burnham plans--transform
it into the most beautiful city of the modern world--to give it a
great, instead of a merely brilliant and erratic civilization--a perfect
administration--what dreamers! What imagination! It is an inspiration to
come into contact with an idealism that money, and power, and daily
contact with the mean and base in human nature--"

"I could love you!" cried Isabel. "If you say any more, I believe I
shall kiss you again."

"If you do," said Gwynne, deliberately, "I shall neither pinch you nor
push you away. But you may regret it, nevertheless."

He threw himself once more into his chair and clasped his hands behind
his head. "It is an astonishing fact," he said--"This--I was reading the
history of the Kearney riots, only the other day. The commentator was
very severe on the Irish and German element that imperilled the city for
purely personal reasons; that was responsible for the most remarkable
and reprehensible of all the State Constitutions. That was not quite
thirty years ago. Whether any of these men, who are mainly of Irish or
German descent, are the sons or grandsons of any of those old Sand-lot
agitators I have no means of knowing; probably not, their fortunes were
no doubt already in the making, and the founders had graduated from the
class that went to sand-lot meetings and shouted, 'The Chinese must go.'
But it is certainly one of the oddest evolutions in history that it
should be the descendants of that foreign element alone that take any
real interest in this city; that are ardent to reform it, beautify it;
that are willing to devote their time and a good part of their fortunes