She paused, biting the end of her pencil. Then she added, ‘I believe I can understand how a man who has created this extraordinary railroad — a man who has dramatically changed the fate of the whole nation — can wish to remain a recluse. What he must feel within him for having spanned a continent! What thoughts he must have! He is a handsome yet tormented person, and even though I have glimpsed him but twice, I feel a warmth and compassion for his historic predicament, and his loneliness. I wish very much that I might meet him one day, and impart my feelings (discreetly, of course!).’

She put away her pad. She knew that she ought to write more — about the hazy purple mountain range that sheltered Salt Lake City, about the alkali plains over which they were passing now, with the smoke from the locomotive’s stack rolling southward on the wild like tumbleweed. She ought to write about the comforts of the palace car in which she was travelling, the walnut and primavera panels, the plush sofas, and the gorgeous amaranth mouldings. She was, after all, here to represent her journal, Ladies’ Home Notes, and her New York lady readers would be fascinated to know how food was prepared at twenty miles per hour, and what it was like to eat antelope steak while flying on rails across the very plains on which the animals had been reared.

But the appearance of The Boss had somehow made all these chatty details seem irrelevant. She thought she had seen in his profile something of the terrifying scale of what had been achieved in building the Sierra Pacific Railroad, and something of the depth and darkness of the imagination which had conceived it. She sat for a long time watching the sun set, her eyes turned by its falling light into transparent amber, her curly hair turned into fraying fire, and her thoughts had been miles and years and hundreds of lifetimes away when the grey-uniformed conductor at last touched her arm and told her that dinner was being served.