“Fancy men consenting to be drawn up to their apartments like babes in a basket!” he said laughingly, alluding to the “lift” process—­“Upon my word, when I think of the strong people of a past age and compare them with the enervated race of to-day, I feel not only pity, but shame, for the visible degeneration of mankind.  Frail nerves, weak hearts, uncertain limbs,—­these are common characteristics of the young, nowadays, instead of being as formerly the natural failings of the old.  Wear and tear and worry of modern existence?—­Oh yes, I know!—­but why the wear tear and worry at all?  What is it for?  Simply for the over-getting of money.  One must live? ... certainly,—­but one is not bound to live in foolish luxury for the sake of out-flaunting one’s neighbors.  Better to live simply and preserve health, than gain a fortune and be a moping dyspeptic for life.  But unless one toils and moils like a beast of burden, one cannot even live simply, some will say!  I don’t believe that assertion.  The peasants of France live simply, and save,—­the peasants of England live wretchedly, and waste!  Voila la difference!  As with nations, so with individuals, —­it is all a question of Will.  ’Where there’s a will there’s a way,’ is a dreadfully trite copybook maxim, but it’s amazingly true all the same.  Now let us to the acceptation of these good things,”—­this, as a pallid, boyish-looking waiter just then entered the room with the luncheon, and in his bustling to and fro manifested unusual eagerness to make himself agreeable—­“I have made excellent friends with this young Ganymede,—­he has sworn never to palm off raisin-wine upon me for Chambertin!”

The waiter blushed and chuckled as though he were conscious of having gained special new dignity and importance,—­and having laid the table, and set the chairs, he departed with a flourishing bow worthy of a prince’s maitre-d’hotel.

“Your name must seem a curious one to these fellows”—­observed Alwyn, when he had gone,—­“Unusual and even mysterious?”

“Why, yes!”—­returned Heliobas with a laugh—­“It would be judged so, I suppose, if I ever gave it,—­but I don’t.  It was only in England, and by an Englishman, that I was once, to my utter amazement, addressed as ’He-ly-oh-bas’—­and I was quite alarmed at the sound of it!  One would think that most people in these educational days knew the Greek word helios,—­and one would also imagine it as easy to say Heliobas as heliograph.  But now to avoid mistakes, whenever I touch British territory and come into contact with British tongues, I give my Christian name only, Cassimir—­the result of which arrangement is, that I am known in this hotel as Mr. Kasmer!  Oh, I don’t mind in the least—­why should I?—­neither the English nor the Americans ever pronounce foreign names properly.  Why I met a newly established young publisher yesterday, who assured me that most of his authors, the female ones especially, are so ignorant of foreign literature that he doubts whether any of them know whether Cervantes was a writer or an ointment!”