"After all, you know, it may only be one dull person telephoning to another dull person--on subjects that don't matter!" Elizabeth laughed and coloured.
"Oh! it isn't telephones in themselves.

It's--" She hesitated, and began again, trying to express herself.

"When one thinks of all the haphazard of history--how nations have tumbled up, or been dragged up, through centuries of blind horror and mistake, how wonderful to see a nation made consciously!--before your eyes--by science and intelligence--everything thought of, everything foreseen! First of all, this wonderful railway, driven across these deserts, against opposition, against unbelief, by a handful of men, who risked everything, and have--perhaps--changed the face of the world!" She stopped smiling.

In truth, her new capacity for dithyramb was no less surprising to herself than to Delaine.
"I return to my point"-- he made it not without tartness--"will the new men be adequate to the new state ?" "Won't they ?" He fancied a certain pride in her bearing.

"They explained to me the other day at Winnipeg what the Government do for the emigrants--how they guide and help them--take care of them in sickness and in trouble, through the first years--protect them, really, even from themselves.