“It is more satisfactory to stay at home and read about it?”

“Infinitely, though less expanding.”

“Then is anything worth while except reading?

“Several things; the pursuit of glory, for one thing, and the active occupied life necessary for its achievement.”

She leaned forward a little; she felt that she had stumbled nearer to him.  “Are you ambitious?” she asked.

“For what it compels life to yield; abstractly, not.  Ambition is the looting of hell in chase of biting flames swirling above a desert of ashes.  As for posthumous fame, it must be about as satisfactory as a draught of ice-water poured down the throat of a man who has died on Sahara.  And yet, even if in the end it all means nothing, if ’from hour to hour we ripe and ripe and then from hour to hour we rot and rot,’ still for a quarter-century or so the nettle of ambition flagellating our brain may serve to make life less uninteresting and more satisfactory.  The abstraction and absorption of the fight, the stinging fear of rivals, the murmur of acknowledgment, the shout of compelled applause,—­they fill the blanks.”

“Tell me,” she said, imperiously, “what do you want?”

“Shall I tell you?  I never have spoken of it to a living soul but Alvarado.  Shall I tell it to a woman,—­and an Iturbi y Moncada?  Could the folly of man further go?”

“If I am a woman I am an Iturbi y Moncada, and if I am an Iturbi y Moncada I have the honor of its generations in my veins.”

“Very good.  I believe you would not betray me, even in the interest of your house.  Would you?”

“No.”

“And I love to talk to you, to tell you what I would tell no other.  Listen, then.  An envoy goes to Mexico next week with letters from Alvarado, desiring that I be the next governor of the Californias, and containing the assurance that the Departmental Junta will endorse me.  I shall follow next month to see Santa Ana personally; I know him well, and he was a friend of my father’s.  I wish to be invested with peculiar powers; that is to say, I wish California to be practically overlooked while I am governor and I wish it understood that I shall be governor as long as I please.  Alvarado will hold no office under the Americans, and is as ready to retire now as a few years later.  Of course my predilection for the Americans must be carefully concealed both from the Mexican government and the mass of the people here:  Santa Ana and Alvarado know what is bound to come; the Mexicans, generally, retain enough interest in the Californias to wish to keep them.  I shall be the last governor of the Department, and I shall employ that period to amalgamate the native population so closely that they will make a strong contingent in the new order of things and be completely under my domination.  I shall establish a college with American professors, so that our youth will be taught to think, and to think in English.