f
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!"

"You will have all the fighting you want over there. You will have to
work twenty times harder than you ever did here, for your accent, your
personality, the thirty years you have lived out of the country you were
born in, all will be against you. You will have to be naturalized in
spite of your birth--I happen to know of a similar case in my father's
practice--and that will take five years. In those five years you will
encounter all the difficulties that strew the way of the foreigner who