"Monsieur," said Gaudissart, who chanced to be turning his watch-key
with a rotatory and periodical click which caught the attention of the
lunatic and contributed no doubt to keep him quiet. "Monsieur, if you
were not a man of superior intelligence" (the fool bowed), "I should
content myself with merely laying before you the material advantages of
this enterprise, whose psychological aspects it would be a waste of time
to explain to you. Listen! Of all kinds of social wealth, is not
time the most precious? To economize time is, consequently, to become
wealthy. Now, is there anything that consumes so much time as those
anxieties which I call 'pot-boiling'?--a vulgar expression, but it puts
the whole question in a nutshell. For instance, what can eat up more
time than the inability to give proper security to persons from whom you
seek to borrow money when, poor at the moment, you are nevertheless rich
in hope?"

"Money,--yes, that's right," said Margaritis.

"Well, Monsieur, I am sent into the departments by a company of bankers
and capitalists, who have apprehended the enormous waste which
rising men of talent are thus making of time, and, consequently,
of intelligence and productive ability. We have seized the idea of
capitalizing for such men their future prospects, and cashing their
talents by discounting--what? TIME; securing the value of it to their
survivors. I may say that it is no longer a question of economizing
time, but of giving it a price, a quotation; of representing in a
pecuniary sense those products developed by time which presumably you
possess in the region of your intellect; of representing also the moral
qualities with which you are endowed, and which are, Monsieur, living
forces,--as living as a cataract, as a steam-engine of three, ten,
twenty, fifty horse-power. Ha! this is progress! the movement onward to
a better state of things; a movement born of the spirit of our epoch; a
movement essentially progressive, as I shall prove to you when we come
to consider the principles involved in the logical co-ordination of
the social fabric. I will now explain my meaning by literal examples,
leaving aside all purely abstract reasoning, which I call the
mathematics of thought. Instead of being, as you are, a proprietor
living upon your income, let us suppose that you are painter, a
musician, an artist, or a poet--"

"I am a painter," said the lunatic.

"Well, so be it. I see you take my metaphor. You a