"You knew that I had to go to Liverpool."
"I'm not going to scold. Did you get your business done at Liverpool?"
"Yes;—one generally gets something done, but never anything very satisfactorily. Of course it's about this railway."
"I should have thought that that was satisfactory. Everybody talks of it as being the greatest thing ever invented. I wish I was a man that I might be concerned with a really great thing like that. I hate little peddling things. I should like to manage the greatest bank in the world, or to be Captain of the biggest fleet, or to make the largest railway. It would be better even than being President of a Republic, because one would have more of one's own way. What is it that you do in it, Paul?"
"They want me now to go out to Mexico about it," said he slowly.
"Shall you go?" said she, throwing herself forward and asking the question with manifest anxiety.
"I think not."
"Why not? Do go. Oh, Paul, I would go with you. Why should you not go? It is just the thing for such a one as you to do. The railway will make Mexico a new country, and then you would be the man who had done it. Why should you throw away such a chance as that? It will never come again. Emperors and kings have tried their hands at Mexico and have been able to do nothing. Emperors and kings never can do anything. Think what it would be to be the regenerator of Mexico!"
"Think what it would be to find one's self there without the means of doing anything, and to feel that one had been sent there merely that one might be out of the way."
"I would make the means of doing something."