After supper he asked Gerald if he would smoke a pipe with him in his laboratory.  Mila must have bored him enough by this time!  They lighted their pipes; but Mila refused to be sent away.  She sat down beside her uncle and put her elbows on the table—­white, strong arms she had, and Gerald only took his eyes from their pleasing contemplation to lift them to hers.  He was fast losing what little prudence he had; he was a Celt, and he felt that he had known Mila for a century.

“Young man,” said Prince Karospina, sharply, “you have the message I gave you last night!  Well—­and you will say no, to my beloved friend K., without knowing why.  And you will think that you have been dealing with a man whose hard head has turned to the mush of human kindness,—­an altruist.  Ah!  I know how you fellows despise the word.  But what have Kropotkin, Elisee Reclus, Jean Grave, or the rest accomplished?  To build up, not to tear down, should be the object of the scientific anarch.  Stop!  You need not say the earth has to be levelled and ploughed before sowing the seed.  That suits turnip fields, not the garden of humanity.  Educate the downtrodden into liberty, is my message, not the slaughtering of monarchs.  How am I going to go about it?  Ah! that’s my affair, my dear sir.  After I read a certain book by Tolstoy, I realized that art was as potent an agent for mischief as the knout.  Music—­music is rooted in sex; it works miracles of evil—­”

“Now, uncle, I won’t hear a word against Chopin,” said Mila, looking toward Gerald for approval.

“Music, Mila, in the hands of evil men is an instrument dangerous to religion, to civilization.  What of Illowski and his crazy attack on Paris and St. Petersburg?  You remember, Shannon!  Leave Wagner out of the question—­there is no fusion of the arts in his music drama—­only bad verse, foolish librettos, dealing with monsters and gods, and indifferent scene-painting.  Moreover, this new music is not understood by the world.  Even if the whole of mankind could be assembled on the roof of the world and at a preconcerted signal made to howl the Marseillaise, it would not be educated to the heights I imagine.  Stage plays—­Shakespeare has no message for our days; Ibsen is an anarchist—­he believes in placing the torpedo under the social ark.  Painting—­it is an affair for state galleries and the cabinets of wealthy amateurs.  Literature is a dead art—­every one writes and reads and no one understands.  Religion!  Ah!  Yes, religion; the world will be a blackened cinder or cometary gas before the love of God is stamped from its heart.  But religion and art must go hand in hand.  Divorced, art has fallen into the Slough of Despond; else has been transformed into an acrid poison wherewith men’s souls are destroyed as if by a virulent absinthe.  United with religion, art is purified.  All art sprang from religion.  All great art, from a Greek statue to a Gothic cathedral, from a Bach fugue to Michael Angelo, was religious.  Therefore, if we are to reach the hearts of the people, we must make art the handmaid of religion.”  He stopped for breath.  Gerald interposed:—­