Elizabeth laughed and coloured.
"Oh! it isn't telephones in themselves. It's--" She hesitated, and began again, trying to express herself. "When one thinks of all the haphazard of history--how nations have tumbled up, or been dragged up, through centuries of blind horror and mistake, how wonderful to see a nation made consciously!--before your eyes--by science and intelligence--everything thought of, everything foreseen! First of all, this wonderful railway, driven across these deserts, against opposition, against unbelief, by a handful of men, who risked everything, and have--perhaps--changed the face of the world!"
She stopped smiling. In truth, her new capacity for dithyramb was no less surprising to herself than to Delaine.
"I return to my point"--he made it not without tartness--"will the new men be adequate to the new state?"
"Won't they?" He fancied a certain pride in her bearing. "They explained to me the other day at Winnipeg what the Government do for the emigrants--how they guide and help them--take care of them in sickness and in trouble, through the first years--protect them, really, even from themselves. And one thinks how Governments have taxed, and tortured, and robbed, and fleeced--Oh, surely, surely, the world improves!" She clasped her hands tightly on her knee, as though trying by the physical action to restrain the feeling within. "And to see here the actual foundations of a great state laid under your eyes, deep and strong, by men who know what it is they are doing--to see history begun on a blank page, by men who know what they are writing--isn't it wonderful, wonderful!"
"Dear lady!" said Delaine, smiling, "America has been dealing with emigrants for generations; and there are people who say that corruption is rife in Canada."
But Elizabeth would not be quenched.
"We come after America--we climb on her great shoulders to see the way. But is there anything in America to equal the suddenness of this? Twelve years ago even--in all this Northwest--practically nothing. And then God said: 'Let there be a nation!'--and there was a nation--in a night and a morning." She waved her hand towards the great expanse of prairie. "And as for corruption--"
"Well?" He waited maliciously.
"There is no great brew without a scum," she said laughing. "But find me a brew anywhere in the world, of such power, with so little."