difference between loss and gain, he would have turned away his head
and said, "Hold up your cards." Neither, as I have had occasion to
explain before, was he actuated by any motive in common with the
vulgar fortune-hunter in his secret resolve to win the hand of the
heiress. He recognized no inequality of worldly gifts between them.
He said to himself, "Whatever she may give me in money, I shall amply
repay in worldly position if I succeed, and succeed I certainly shall.
If I were as rich as Lord Westminster, and still cared about being
Prime Minister, I should select her as the most fitting woman I have
seen for a Prime Minister's wife."

It must be acknowledged that this sort of self-commune, if not that of
a very ardent lover, is very much that of a sensible man setting high
value on himself, bent on achieving the prizes of a public career, and
desirous of securing in his wife a woman who would adorn the station
to which he confidently aspired. In fact, no one so able as
Chillingly Gordon would ever have conceived the ambition of being
Minister of England if in all that in private life constitutes the
English gentleman he could be fairly subject to reproach.

He was but in public life what many a gentleman honest in private life
has been before him, an ambitious, resolute egotist, by no means
without personal affections, but holding them all subordinate to the
objects of personal ambition, and with no more of other principle than
that of expediency in reference to his own career than would cover a
silver penny. But expediency in itself he deemed the statesman's only
rational principle. And to the consideration of expediency he brought
a very unprejudiced intellect, quite fitted to decide whether the
public opinion of a free and enlightened people was for turning St.
Paul's Cathedral into an Agapemone or not.