It has served my turn, and after next week I shall have earned
the amount that years ago I determined to earn. Thenceforth, set above
the accidents of fortune, I propose to devote myself to higher aims,
those of legitimate ambition. So far as my time would allow I have
already taken some share in politics as a worker; I intend to continue
in them as a ruler which I still have the health and ability to do. I
mean to be one of the first men in this Empire, to ride to power over
the heads of all the nonentities whose only claim upon the confidence of
their countrymen is that they were born in a certain class, with money
in their pockets and without the need to spend the best of their manhood
in work. With you at my side I can do all these things and more, and
such is the future that I have to offer you."
Again she would have broken in upon his speech and again he stopped her,
reading the unspoken answer on her lips.
"Listen: I have not told you all. Perhaps I have put first what should
have come last. I have not told you that I love you earnestly and
sincerely, with the settled, unalterable love that sometimes comes to
men in middle-age who have never turned their thought that way before.
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