know
now how badly this country needs one disinterested man of genius."

"I am not disinterested. I never felt more selfish in my life."

"You have an immense capacity for disinterested statesmanship. Of course
all motives, especially with the highly gifted, are complex. You have
said yourself they would be fanatics otherwise. And you are far more
American than you know, although you have just confessed that you do
know it well enough at times. All your American ancestors may be living
again in you. It was your own instinct, no influence of mine, that sent
you out here, filled with mixed but high ambitions. No full-blooded
Englishman would ever do what you have done. Insanity and inebriety skip
a generation. Why not Americanism? Heaven knows there is nothing
American about your mother. And when the political cleanup comes, as it
is bound to--"

"Oh, I am sick of this everlasting optimism: 'Everything is bound to
come out all right,' 'God's own country,' and all the rest of it. I can
understand it well enough out here, though. It is a wonder to me that
any Californian has energy enough to care. Life is easy at the worst.
The scoundrels batten unnoticed--although they are sending up the price
of everything; and the most ungrateful and rapacious labor class on
earth never get their deserts. The labor class hasn't a leg to stand on,
so far as bare justice goes. Pity they can't have a taste of Eastern
factories and wages and climate for a while. If it were not for its bay
and the tremendous significance of its position opposite the Orient,
California would be what it ought to be, the pleasure gardens of the
world. No politics, no labor-unions, merely a succession of estates, big
and little, where a man could live a happy animal existence for
one-third of the year, after working the other two-thirds--that is a
sane division. But if I stay here I work. And for what ultimate object?
England, as sure as fate."

"You cannot possibly tell how you will feel twenty years hence--"

"Twenty years! That is a fair estimate, no doubt! I believe that the
real secret of discontent has been the prospect of this cursed period of
inaction. Nice substitute--coruscating as a blooming barrister; and it's
mighty difficult to travel along for four years without showing your
hand. It requires a tact that I may or may not have. If I have it, there
may be other depths of hideous guile, as yet undiscovered. I have had
glimpses of them already. Al