"but only if it gives birth to a dancing heaven,
or, at least, a dancing star."

"Beware of dancing stars," said Wilhelm, laughing and looking at
Frederick significantly.

"What can a man do if his blood is on fire with that cursed poison?"

Under the influence of the champagne, the sudden confession seemed as
natural to Wilhelm as to Frederick.

"'There once was a rat in a cellar hole,'" Wilhelm quoted.

"Of course, of course," said Frederick, "but what is to be done against
it?" Then he turned the conversation to general questions again. "Why
should a man keep himself intact when he has lost his ideals? I have made
_tabula rasa_ of my past. I have drowned Germany in the ocean. Is Germany
really the great, strong, united Empire? Is it not rather the booty over
which God and the devil--I was about to say the Kaiser and the Pope--are
still wrangling? You will admit that for more than a thousand years, the
unifying principle was the imperial principle. People talk of the Thirty
Years' War as having disintegrated Germany. I should say it was the
thousand years' war, of which the Thirty Years' War was only the worst
excess, the worst paroxysm of that plague of religious dissension with
which the Germans are inoculated. And without unity, Germany is a very
queer structure. Its owners, or its inhabitants, don't possess it, except
in a slight degree. And the believer with the tiara at Rome tugs and tugs
at it, levying extortion under the threat of destroying the entire
structure; until he is actually able to buy it back with the compound
interest that has been accumulating. In that case nothing will be left
but a heap of ruins. One could shriek and tear one's hair because the
German does not see that in his basement there is an awful Bluebeard's
chamber. And not for women alone. He has no inkling of what an arsenal
of clerical instruments of torture lie there ready for use--clerical,
because they lie ready for the infliction of horrible corporal martyrdom
in the service of a bloody, fanatical, papistical belief. Woe, when the
door to the Bluebeard chamber opens. They are continually picking at the
lock. Then we shall witness all the sanguinary horrors of the Thirty
Years' War, the degenerate slaughter-house cruelty of an inquisition."

"That's something we won't drink a toast to. Rather let us toast the
healthy, cynically outspoken ideal of the American, the exploiter ideal,
with its tolerance and levelling down."

"Yes