though fatal elegance, will soon begin to perform its true function, and putting its strength at the service of the entire people, will behave like a docile, toiling monster.  But in order that the motor may cease to be injurious and become beneficent we must build roads suited to its speed, roads which it cannot tear up with its ferocious tyres, and from which it will send no clouds of poisonous dust into human lungs.  We ought not to allow slower vehicles or mere animals to go upon those roads, and we should establish garages upon them and foot-bridges over them, and so create order and harmony among the means of communication of the future.  That is the wish of every good citizen.”

Madame Clarence led the conversation back to the improvements in M. Ceres’ constituency.  M. Ceres showed his enthusiasm for demolitions, tunnelings, constructions, reconstructions, and all other fruitful operations.

“We build to-day in an admirable style,” said he; “everywhere majestic avenues are being reared.  Was ever anything as fine as our arcaded bridges and our domed hotels!”

“You are forgetting that big palace surmounted an immense melon-shaped dome,” grumbled by M. Daniset, an old art amateur, in a voice of restrained rage.  “I am amazed at the degree of ugliness which a modern city can attain.  Alca is becoming Americanised.  Everywhere we are destroying all that is free, unexpected, measured, restrained, human, or traditional among the things that are left us.  Everywhere we are destroying that charming object, a piece of an old wall that bears up the branches of a tree.  Everywhere we are suppressing some fragment of light and air, some fragment of nature, some fragment of the associations that still remain with us, some fragment of our fathers, some fragment of ourselves.  And we are putting up frightful, enormous, infamous houses, surmounted in Viennese style by ridiculous domes, or fashioned after the models of the ‘new art’ without mouldings, or having profiles with sinister corbels and burlesque pinnacles, and such monsters as these shamelessly peer over the surrounding buildings.  We see bulbous protuberances stuck on the fronts of buildings and we are told they are ‘new art’ motives.  I have seen the ‘new art’ in other countries, but it is not so ugly as with us; it has fancy and it has simplicity.  It is only in our own country that by a sad privilege we may behold the newest and most diverse styles of architectural ugliness.  Not an enviable privilege!”

“Are you not afraid,” asked M. Ceres severely, “are you not afraid that these bitter criticisms tend to keep out of our capital the foreigners who flow into it from all arts of the world and who leave millions behind them?”

“You may set your mind at rest about that,” answered M. Daniset.  “Foreigners do not come to admire our buildings; they come to see our courtesans, our dressmakers, and our dancing saloons.”

“We have one bad habit,” sighed M. Ceres, “it is that we calumniate ourselves.”