"My dear girl, I have been too harassed to consider the amenities. And when a man is rearranging his whole life he must isolate himself or run the risk of clouds in his judgment."
He paused. She disguised her mortification and answered, kindly: "I can understand that in this sudden demand for readjustment you have had many bad moments. It was far too soon for you to go up to the Peers'. But with your marvellous energies, your genius—there is no other word for it—you can soon astonish the world anew with a patent for defossilization. At all events the Peers' will enter upon a new life as a sort of mastodon cave swept out and illuminated by the most energetic and aspiring of knights-errant."
Gwynne laughed dryly. "The rôle does not appeal to me; nor any other in the same setting. I have done a month of the hardest thinking of my life. Everything that went before looks like child's play. I have arrived at the definite conclusion that my career in England has come to a full stop, and I have made up my mind to create another—out of whole cloth—in the United States."
She stared at him, her face not yet unset, but her eyes expanding with incredulous apprehension. "You mean to desert England?" she asked, quietly.
"Forever. Absolutely. It is all or nothing. I cannot become an American citizen until five years after entering the country, and I do not wish to lose any valuable time. Having made up my mind, I have ceased to wonder if I shall like it. That is now beside the question. I shall drop my title as a matter of course, and hope that I shall pass undiscovered as John Gwynne. In short, I shall begin life all over again—as if I were a criminal in disguise instead of the sport of circumstances. I have ceased to regret the inevitable and begun to be stimulated by the thought of a struggle to which all that I have had here was a mere game, and I am sure that you, with your brains and energy, will enjoy the fight as much as I. I am not going into the wilderness. We shall be only two hours from San Francisco, which I am told is the only city in America that in the least suggests Europe; it should be very attractive. On the ranch you shall have every comfort and luxury. You must be sick of London, anyhow. You have conquered everything here."
He paused and regarded her in some trepidation. In spite of his self-confidence he had had his moments of doubt. And although he had anticipated tears and remonstrance, he was unprepared for the more subtle 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?"