find it absurd that if a person has a desire to penetrate into
the beauties of a symphony or a picture, he should do so. What is there
strange in that?"

"You are right," said Caesar; "whoever wants to learn, should. I have
done so about financial questions."

"Is it true that your brother knows all about questions of money?"
Kennedy asked Laura.

"He says so."

"I haven't much belief in his financial knowledge."

"No?"

"No, I have not. You are a sort of dilettante, half nihilist, half
financier. You would like to pass for a tranquil, well-balanced man, for
what is called a philistine, but you cannot compass it."

"I will compass it. It is true that I want to be a philistine, but a
philistine out in the real world. All those great artists you people
admire, Goethe, Ruskin, were really philistines, who were in the
business of being interested in poetry and statues and pictures."

"Moncada, you are a sophist," said Kennedy. "Possibly I am wrong in this
discussion," retorted Caesar, "but the feeling I have is right. Artists
irritate me; they seem to me like old ladies with a flatulency that
prevents their breathing freely."

Kennedy laughed at the definition.

_CHIC AND THE REVOLUTION_

"I understand hating bad kings and conquerors; but artists! What harm do
they do?" said Laura.

"Artists are always doing harm to the whole of humanity. They have
invented an esthetic system for the use of the rich, and they have
killed the Revolution. The _chic_ put an end to the Revolution. And
now everything is coming back; enthusiasm for the aristocracy, for the
Church; the cult of kings. People look backward and the Revolutionary
movement is paralysed. The people that irritate me most are those
esthetes of the Ruskin school, for whom everything is religious: having
money, buying jewels, blowing one's nose... everything is religious.
Vulgar creatures, lackeys that they are!"

"My brother is a demagogue," said Laura ironically.

"Yes," added Kennedy; "he doesn't like categories."

"But each thing has its value whether he likes it or not."

"I do not deny different values, or even categories. There are things of
great value in life; some natural, like youth, beauty, strength;
others more artificial, like money, social position; but this idea of
distinction, of aristocratic fineness, is a farce. It is a literary
legend in the same style as the one current in novels, which tells
us that the aristocrats of old fami