He turned over on to his back, and laid his hands palm uppermost over his eyes.

“That’s part of the glory of it all,” he said; “that art and its emotions become part of you like the food you eat and the wine you drink.  Art is always making us; it enters into our character and destiny.  As long as you go on growing you assimilate, and thank God one’s mind or soul, or whatever you like to call it, goes on growing for a long time.  I suppose the moment comes to most people when they cease to grow, when they become fixed and hard; and that is what we mean by being old.  But till then you weave your destiny, or, rather, people and beauty weave it for you, as you’ll see the Norns weaving, and yet you never know what you are making.  You make what you are, and you never are because you are always becoming.  You must excuse me; but Germans are always metaphysicians, and they can’t help it.”

“Go on; be German,” said Michael.

“Lieber Gott!  As if I could be anything else,” said Falbe, laughing.  “We are the only nation which makes a science of experimentalism; we try everything, just as a puppy tries everything.  It tries mutton bones, and match-boxes, and soap and boots; it tries to find out what its tail is for, and bites it till it hurts, on which it draws the conclusion that it is not meant to eat.  Like all metaphysicians, too, and dealers in the abstract, we are intensely practical.  Our passion for experimentalism is dictated by the firm object of using the knowledge we acquire.  We are tremendously thorough; we waste nothing, not even time, whereas the English have an absolute genius for wasting time.  Look at all your games, your sports, your athletics—­I am being quite German now, and forgetting my mother, bless her!—­they are merely devices for getting rid of the hours, and so not having to think.  You hate thought as a nation, and we live for it.  Music is thought; all art is thought; commercial prosperity is thought; soldiering is thought.”

“And we are a nation of idiots?” asked Michael.

“No; I didn’t say that.  I should say you are a nation of sensualists.  You value sensation above everything; you pursue the enjoyable.  You are a nation of children who are always having a perpetual holiday.  You go straying all over the world for fun, and annex it generally, so that you can have tiger-shooting in India, and lots of gold to pay for your tiger-shooting in Africa, and fur from Canada for your coats.  But it’s all a game; not one man in a thousand in England has any idea of Empire.”

“Oh, I think you are wrong there,” said Michael.  “You believe that only because we don’t talk about it.  It’s—­it’s like what we agreed about Parsifal.  We don’t talk about it because it is so much part of us.”

Falbe sat up.