s the life of even one 'famous' man will
never be such a fool as to wish for the capricious plaudits of a
fool-public. And love!--love does not exist--not what _I_ call love!"

"Oh! May I have your definition?"

"Why yes!--of course you may! Love, to my thinking, means complete
harmony between two souls--like two notes that make a perfect chord.
The man must feel that he can thoroughly trust and reverence the
woman,--the woman must feel the same towards the man. And the sense of
'reverence' is perhaps the best and most binding quality. But nowadays
what woman will you find worth reverence?--what man so free from drink
and debauchery as to command it? The human beings of our day are often
less respectable than the beasts! I can imagine love,--what it might
be--what it should be--but till we have a very different and more
spiritualised world, the thing is impossible."

Again, Gwent was silent for some minutes. Then he said--

"Apparently the spirit of destructiveness is strong in you. As 'master
of the world'--to quote your own words, I presume that in the event of
a nation or nations deciding on war, you would give them a time-limit
to consider and hold conference, with their allies--and then--if they
were resolved to begin hostilities--"

"Then I could--and WOULD--wipe them off the face of the earth in
twenty-four hours!" said Seaton, calmly--"From nations they should
become mere dust-heaps! War makes its own dust-heaps, but with
infinitely more cost and trouble--the way of exit I offer would be
cheap in comparison!"

Gwent smiled a grim smile.

"Well, I come back to my former question"--he said--"Suppose the
occasion arose, and you did all this, what pleasure to yourself do you
foresee?"

"The pleasure of clearing the poor old earth of some of its
pestilential microbes!"--answered Seaton, "Something of the same
thankful satisfaction Sir Ronald Ross must have experienced when he
discovered the mosquito-breeders of yellow fever and malaria, and
caused them to be stamped out. The men who organise national disputes
are a sort of mosquito, infecting their fellow-creatures with perverted
mentality and disease,--they should be exterminated."

"Why not begin with the newspaper offices?" suggested Gwent--"The
purlieus of cheap journalism are the breeding-places of the human
malaria-mosquito."

"True! And it wouldn't be a bad idea to stamp them out," here Seaton
threw back his head with the challenging gesture which