“You can also tell Mr. Rowan, if you have occasion to, if you wish to,” he said, looking at her attentively. She merely bowed. “I think that you will approve of my plans,” he went on with earnestness. “I have found what I believe to be my place and work in this vortex of the nineteenth century, and I wish to fill that place and do that work in the best manner I can. I have been offered a position as _attaché_ at one of our embassies, but I am not ready for that yet. I am not fit for anything that I wish to do.” Warming with his subject, Carl stood up, and leaned on a high chair-back opposite Edith while he talked. His face became animated, his manner had a charming cordiality and frankness. When his time should come for speaking or writing, or taking any part in the affairs of his country, he wished to be considered an authority, and to deserve that consideration. To that end, he must have more knowledge, not of courts, or camps, or books, though these were worth knowing, but of people as they live in their own homes, in their own lands, under laws strange to us. He wanted to know the world’s poor, and the world’s criminals, and the world’s saints, wherever he could find them. “You have observed, in drawing faces,” he said, “how one little line will alter the whole expression. It is the same with arguments. A great, loose, sophistical generalization may be as completely upset by one sharp little fact, as Goliath was by David. I want to have a sling full of those facts. A plain hard truth may be made attractive by a single beautiful illustration; and I wish to gather illustrations from the whole world. I hate a sour patriotism, and I would not think, nor speak, nor write narrowly on any subject.