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silk-faced frock-coat a superfine dignity. His hair was iron grey, his
eyebrows were still black, and his massive profile was the profile of
a Caesar's head on an old Roman coin. But his parentage was German and
Scotch and English, with remote strains of Danish and French blood,
giving him the temperament of a Puritan and an insatiable imagination
of conquest. He was completely unbending to his visitor, because of the
warm introduction the visitor had brought from Europe, and because of
an irrational liking for earnestness and determination wherever met, to
whatever end directed.
"The Costaguana Government shall play its hand for all it's worth--and
don't you forget it, Mr. Gould. Now, what is Costaguana? It is the
bottomless pit of 10 per cent. loans and other fool investments.
European capital has been flung into it with both hands for years. Not
ours, though. We in this country know just about enough to keep indoors
when it rains. We can sit and watch. Of course, some day we shall step
in. We are bound to. But there's no hurry. Time itself has got to wait
on the greatest country in the whole of God's Universe. We shall be
giving the word for everything: industry, trade, law, journalism, art,
politics, and religion, from Cape Horn clear over to Smith's Sound,
and beyond, too, if anything worth taking hold of turns up at the North
Pole. And then we shall have the leisure to take in hand the outlying
islands and continents of the earth. We shall run the world's business
whether the world likes it or not. The world can't help it--and neither
can we, I guess."
By this he meant to express his faith in destiny in words suitable to
his intelligence, which was unskilled in the presentation of general
ideas. His intelligence was nourished on facts; and Charles Gould, whose
imagination had been permanently affected by the one great fact of a
silver mine, had no objection to this theory of the world's future.
If it had seemed distasteful for a moment it was because the sudden
statement of such vast eventualities dwarfed almost to nothingness the
actual matter in hand. He and his plans and all the mineral wealth of
the Occidental Province appeared suddenly robbed of every vestige of
magnitude. The sensation was disagreeable; but Charles Gould was not
dull. Already he felt that he was producing a favourable impression; the
consciousness of that flattering fact helped him to a vague smile, which
his big interlocutor took for a smile of discreet and admiring assent.
He smiled quietly, too; and immediately Charles Gould, with that mental
agility mankind will display in defence of a cherished hope, reflected
that the very apparent insignificance of his aim would help him to
success. His personality and his mine would be taken up because it was
a matter of no great consequence, one way or another, to a man who
referred his action to such a prodigious destiny. And Charles Gould was
not humiliated by this consideration, because the thing remained as
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