He might no doubt go on learning, and, after a time,
might be able to exert himself in a perhaps useful, but altogether
uninteresting kind of way, doing his work simply because it was
there to be done,--as the carter or the tailor does his;--and from
the same cause, knowing that a man must have bread to live. But as
for ambition, and the idea of doing good, and the love of work for
work's sake,--as for the elastic springs of delicious and beneficent
labour,--all that was over for him. He would have worked from day
till night, and from night till day, and from month till month
throughout the year to have secured for Violet Effingham the
assurance that her husband's position was worthy of her own. But now
he had no motive for such work as this. As long as he took the public
pay, he would earn it; and that was all.
On the next day things were a little better with him. He received a
note in the morning from Lord Cantrip saying that they two were to
see the Prime Minister that evening, in order that the whole question
of the railway to the Rocky Mountains might be understood, and
Phineas was driven to his work. Before the time of the meeting came
he had once more lost his own identity in great ideas of colonial
welfare, and had planned and peopled a mighty region on the Red
River, which should have no sympathy with American democracy.
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