Elizabeth had got the talk away from the personal note upon which Clavering had pitched it, and he, seeing he had said enough for a beginning, followed Elizabeth’s conversational lead. He asked her many questions about her life in India, all singularly intelligent and well put, because drinking at the fountain of other people’s talk had been his chief source of education during his whole life. And Clavering, without being widely read, was far from being an ignorant man. Although he knew not a word of any language except his own, nor the history of any country except his own, he was well acquainted with the history of his own times, and he knew who every living man of importance in his own country and Europe was, and what he was doing. Seeing that Elizabeth was susceptible to the charms of conversation and had a distinct intellectual side, Clavering appealed to her on that side. He told her with an inimitable raciness and humor some of the incidents of his early life in the West, his later adventures, even of his career in the Senate.
“I think I never worked so hard in my life as I have during the five years I’ve been in the Senate,” he said. “No man can come to the Senate of the United States with the education of a sutler, miner, promoter, speculator, and what not—such as I have had—and not work hard; that is, if he expects to be anything else than a dummy. But it isn’t in James Clavering to be a dummy anywhere. So I have thought and read and worked and slaved, and bought other men’s brains in the last five years as earnestly as any man ever did. The result is that when I open my mouth now the senators listen. At first the lawyers in the Senate used to hide a grin when I began to speak, and I admit I did make some bad breaks in the beginning. But I saw my way out of that clearly enough. I found a man who was really a great constitutional lawyer, although he had never been able to make more than a bare living out of his profession in Chicago. I have always invested liberally in brains. When you can actually buy brains or news, you are buying the two most valuable commodities on earth. Well, when I took up a question I had my man go over the legal aspects of it and put them down in black and white. Then I knew well enough how to use them, and I may say without boasting that I have done as well, or better, than any man of my opportunities now in the Senate. However, I don’t compare myself with such men as Andrew Johnson. You know his wife taught him to write, and that man rose to be President of the United States. Of course he wasn’t what you would call a scholarly man, like many of the senators, but good Lord! think of the vast propelling force that took an illiterate man from the tailor’s bench and gave him such a career as Andrew Johnson’s, and made him Vice–President of the United States. Those men—and men like me, too—can’t be called all–round men, like Senator Thorndyke, for example. All of us have got great big gaps and holes in our knowledge and judgment and conduct that the normal well–educated man hasn’t. But where we are strong, we are stronger than they. Do you know anything about Thorndyke?”