One instant it would be a wild dream of overrunning the East.

The next it was a schedule of the ships, the ports, the stores, the troops, which would be needed to turn dream into fact.

He gripped the heart of a question with the same decision which made him strike straight for an enemy's capital.
The soul of a poet, and the mind of a man of business of the first order, that is the combination which may make a man dangerous to the world.
I think that it may have been his purpose--for he never did anything without a purpose--to give me an object-lesson of his own capacity for governing, with the idea, perhaps, that I might in turn influence others of the Emigres by what I told them.

At any rate he left me there to stand and to watch the curious succession of points upon which he had to give an opinion during a few hours.

Nothing seemed to be either too large or too small for that extraordinary mind.