Heliobas laughed, nodded, and after a slight pause resumed: 

“It is astonishing to me that people do not see to what an infinite number of uses they could put the little re-discovery they have made of luminous paint.  In that simple thing there is a secret, which as yet they do not guess—­a wonderful, beautiful, scientific secret, which may perhaps take them a few hundred years to find out.  In the meantime they have got hold of one end of the thread; they can make luminous paint, and with it they can paint light-houses, and, what is far more important—­ships.  Vessels in mid-ocean will have no more need of fog-signals and different-coloured lamps; their own coat of paint will be sufficient to light them safely on their way.  Even rooms can be so painted as to be perfectly luminous at night.  A friend of mine, residing in Italy, has a luminous ballroom, where the ceiling is decorated with a moon and stars in electric light.  The effect is exceedingly lovely; and though people think a great deal of money must have been laid out upon it, it is perhaps the only great ballroom in Italy that has been really cheaply fitted up.  But, as I said before, there is another secret behind the invention or discovery of luminous paint—­a secret which, when once unveiled, will revolutionize all the schools of art in the world.”

“Do you know this secret?” asked Mrs. Challoner.

“Yes, madame—­perfectly.”

“Then why don’t you disclose it for the benefit of everybody?” demanded Erne Challoner.

“Because, my dear young lady, no one would believe me if I did.  The time is not yet ripe for it.  The world must wait till its people are better educated.”

“Better educated!” exclaimed Mrs. Everard.  “Why, there is nothing talked of nowadays but education and progress!  The very children are wiser than their parents!”

“The children!” returned Heliobas, half inquiringly, half indignantly.  “At the rate things are going, there will soon be no children left; they will all be tired little old men and women before they are in their teens.  The very babes will be born old.  Many of them are being brought up without any faith in God or religion; the result will be an increase of vice and crime.  The purblind philosophers, miscalled wise men, who teach the children by the light of poor human reason only, and do away with faith in spiritual things, are bringing down upon the generations to come an unlooked-for and most terrific curse.  Childhood, the happy, innocent, sweet, unthinking, almost angelic age, at which Nature would have us believe in fairies and all the delicate aerial fancies of poets, who are, after all, the only true sages—­childhood, I say, is being gradually stamped out under the cruel iron heel of the Period—­a period not of wisdom, health, or beauty, but one of drunken delirium, in which the world rushes feverishly along, its eyes fixed on one hard, glittering, stony-featured