Still Cleopatra lingered. She wanted to say more, and Mrs. Delarayne divined that she wanted to say more. The words, however, were hard to find, and, at last, bidding her mother "Good-night," she departed only half comforted.
CHAPTER VIII
Lord Henry felt he had done his best for England, and now his mind turned covetously towards a country and a clime where his best promised to yield richer and better fruit. He had mended society's nervous wrecks so long that he had come to look upon the whole modern world as a machine too hopelessly out of gear to repay his skilful efforts.
"People who never sit down to a meal with an appetite," he would say, "people whose bodies are as surcharged as their houses with superfluous loot, cannot hope to be well, physically or spiritually. We live on an island huddled together, and yet we grow every day further apart. For the acquisition of superfluous loot means incessant strife. The worst sign of the times is that abstract terms no longer mean the same thing to any two people. Individualism is thus destroying even the value of language. Because where each man has his individual view a common language itself becomes an impossibility. The effort of the Middle Ages was to convert Europe into a single nation. The effort of the modern or 'Muddle' Age, is to convert each single nation into a Europe. That is why abstract terms are slowly losing their value as the current coin of speech."
St. Maur had attached himself to Lord Henry as a kind of voluntary or honorary secretary. He assisted his master where and when he could, and felt that he was more than adequately repaid in the enormous amount he learnt from him.
"Is there no remedy?" he demanded seriously on a day early in August, when the prospect of losing his friend was weighing more heavily than usual upon him. The two were sitting talking in the study of Lord Henry's cottage which stood in a lane off the London road, about two miles north of Ashbury, where his sanatorium was situated.
"There is a remedy, of course," replied Lord Henry. "It would consist in uniting modern nations afresh by means of a powerful common culture. It is only then that men can be guided and led, for it is only then that they can understand what they are taught about life and humanity. In the Middle Ages a common culture was so universal, that even the barriers of nationality did not prevent men from understanding one another. Now there is such a total lack of a uniform culture that men of the same nation speak an unknown tongue to one another. That is the recipe for stupidity."
"But cannot this new uniform culture be created?" St. Maur insisted.