“It isn’t money that does the real things,” she said, after a few meditative puffs. “To hear an American say so must sound strange to your English ears. You believe, I know, that Americans make money an Almighty God that can work any miracles over man and natural forces that you please. But it isn’t so. The miracles, such as they are, that America has performed, have been due to the naked human soul. Money has come as an accident or an accretion and has helped things along. We have a saying which you may have heard: ‘Money talks.’ That’s just it. It talks. But the soul has had to act first. Money had nothing to do with American Independence. It was the soul of George Washington. It wasn’t money that invented the phonograph. It was the soul of the train newsboy Edison. It wasn’t money that brought into being the original Cornelius Vanderbilt. It was the soul of the old ferryman that divined the power of steam both on sea and land a hundred years ago, and accidentally or incidentally or logically or what you please, founded the Vanderbilt fortune. I could go on for ever with instances from my own country—instances that every school-child knows. In the eyes of the world the Almighty Dollar may seem to rule America —but every thinking American knows in his heart of hearts that the Almighty Dollar is but an accidental symbol of the Almighty soul of man. And it’s the soul that we’re proud of and that keeps the nation together. All this more or less was at the back of my mind when I said where there’s a soul there’s a way.” As this little speech progressed her face lost its expression of serene and humorous contentment with the world, and grew eager and her eyes shone and her voice quickened. He regarded her as some fainéant Homeric warrior might have regarded the goddess who had descended cloud-haste from Olympus to exhort him to noble deeds. The exhortation fluttered both pride and pulses. He saw in her a woman capable of great things and she had appealed to him as a man also capable. “You have pointed me out the way to Egypt,” he said. “I’m glad,” said Lucilla. “Look me up when you get there,” she added with a smile. “It seems a big place, but it isn’t. Cairo, Luxor, Assouan—and at any rate the Semiramis Hotel at Cairo.”