"You have weak spots like other people, of course. You would be a horrid prig if you hadn't. But you surely must know if your Liberalism is sincere, ingrained. There is no question that you are a hopeless aristocrat in essentials. But so have been certain of America's greatest patriots--Washington and Hamilton, for instance. I do not see that it matters. One can hold to what seems to me the first principles of advanced civilization--that hereditary monarchy is an insult to self-respecting and enlightened men--without wishing to associate with those that offend grammar and good taste. Education, intellect, breeding, would create an aristocracy among anarchists on a desert island--supposing any possessed them; and in time it would become as intolerant of liberties as if it harked back to the battle of Hastings. There is no plant that grows so rapidly in the human garden as self-superiority, and it is ridiculous only when watered by nothing more excusable than the arbitrary social conditions that exist in the United States. I don't see that the qualities you have inherited should interfere with your ability to see the justice and rationality of self-government." "They do not!" She seemed to beat his thoughts into their old coherent and logical forms. "Whatever may have been the various motives that impelled me into the Liberal party in the beginning, there is no question that I have become even more extreme and single-minded than I have let the world know. Perhaps it is my American blood, although I never thought of that before. At all events, had the time been ripe I should have devoted all the gift for leadership I now possess, and all the power I could build up, to overturning monarchy in this country and establishing a republic. There! I never confessed as much to a living soul, but I think you have bewitched me, for I never have been less--or more--myself!" "With yourself as President?" "Sooner or later--the sooner the better. But I waste no time in dreams, my fair cousin--although I have something of a tendency that way. It was enough that I had a great and useful career before me and might have gone into history as the prime factor of the great change." "Well, that is over," said Isabel, conclusively. "There is only one thing left you and that is to come over and be an American." "What?" He stared, and then laughed. "Ah!"