The subject was simply a plan of finance, and lacked all excuse for fine phrasing or flavor of sentiment. And what should a boy of twenty-three know about a nation's financial policy? Yet this boy knew all about it. Figures, statistics, results, conclusions, were shown in a steady, flowing, accurate, lucid manner. The young man knew his theme--every byway, highway and tracing of it. By that speech he proved his mathematical genius, and blazed the way straight to the office of Chancellor of the Exchequer. Not only did he know his theme, but he had the ability to explain it. He spoke without hesitation or embarrassment, and revealed the same splendid dignity that his father had shown, all flavored by the same dash of indifference for the auditor. But the discerning ones saw that he surpassed his father, in that he carried more reserve and showed a suavity that was not the habit of Chatham. And the man was there--mighty and self-reliant. The voice is the index of the soul. The voice of the two Pitts was the same voice, we have been told--a deep, rich, cultivated lyric-barytone. It was a trained voice, a voice that came from a full column of air, that never broke into a screech, rasping the throat of the speaker and the ear of the listener. It was the natural voice carefully developed by right use. The power of Pitt lay in his cold, calculating intellect, but the instrument that made manifest this intellect was his deep, resonant, perfectly controlled voice. Pitt never married, and according to the biting phrase of Fox, all he knew of love was a description of it he got from the Iliad. That is to say, he was separated from it about three thousand years. This is a trifle too severe, for when twenty-one years of age he met the daughter of Necker at Paris--she who was to give the world of society a thrill as Madame de Stael. And if the gossips are right it was not the fault of Pitt that a love-match did not follow. But the woman gauged the man, and she saw that love to him would be merely an incident, not a consuming passion, and she was not the woman to write a book on Farthest North. She dallied with the young man a day, and then sent him about his business, exasperated and perplexed. He could strike fire with men as flint strikes on steel, but women were outside his realm. Yet he followed the career of Madame de Stael, and never managed to quite get her out of his life. Once, in his later years, he referred to her as that "cold and trifling daughter of France's greatest financier." He admired the father more than he loved the daughter.