e
the father and the mother of the Charter of the Cities."

Quin looked down at the _debris_ of leaves and timber, the relics of
the battle and stampede, now glistening in the growing daylight, and
finally said--

"Yet nothing can alter the antagonism--the fact that I laughed at
these things and you adored them."

Wayne's wild face flamed with something god-like, as he turned it to
be struck by the sunrise.

"I know of something that will alter that antagonism, something that
is outside us, something that you and I have all our lives perhaps
taken too little account of. The equal and eternal human being will
alter that antagonism, for the human being sees no real antagonism
between laughter and respect, the human being, the common man, whom
mere geniuses like you and me can only worship like a god. When dark
and dreary days come, you and I are necessary, the pure fanatic, the
pure satirist. We have between us remedied a great wrong. We have
lifted the modern cities into that poetry which every one who knows
mankind knows to be immeasurably more common than the commonplace. But
in healthy people there is no war between us. We are but the two lobes
of the brain of a ploughman. Laughter and love are everywhere. The
cathedrals, built in the ages that loved God, are full of blasphemous
grotesques. The mother laughs continually at the child, the lover
laughs continually at the lover, the wife at the husband, the friend
at the friend. Auberon Quin, we have been too long separated; let us
go out together. You have a halberd and I a sword, let us start our
wanderings over the world. For we are its two essentials. Come, it is
already day."

In the blank white light Auberon hesitated a moment. Then he made the
formal salute with his halberd, and they went away together into the
unknown world.

THE END

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