“Are you there?” inquired Victor de Laumel of Lionel through the telephone, a few days before the opening of the palace.
“Is that you, Victor?”
“Yes; we are all very much amused over here, and wonder if you are really in earnest about your Palace of Happiness?”
“Nothing more serious, my dear boy. It will be the crowning of all our social reforms.”
“Bah, mon cher! you have lost all your sense of humour! When I think of our diners fins, and our pleasant chats together, I cannot understand your making such fools of yourselves—especially over a mere trifle.”
“Trifle, my dear Victor! This is the most important event in our history, and the results to which this trifle will lead are colossal. But you will one day perhaps be induced to imitate us.”
“Nonsense, my dear man; we are too eclectic to return to paradisaical fashions. Rabelais, with his boisterous jovialty, and sound doctrine of good health united to good spirits, is more to the taste of a race which to this day, in some provinces, speaks his sixteenth-century vernacular, and inherits his practical views of life.”
“Ah! but we have read Carlyle, my dear Victor, and seen through the hollowness of our former social fabric.”
“Mon cher ami, had you carefully read Montaigne, you would know that the great essayist had hurled a stone at the tawdriness of our clothes-screens long before the Recluse of Cheyne Walk. But I forget that you take this kind of thing to heart! You are a moral race—oh! a very moral one—whatever you may do.”
“I think, dear Victor, you will be impressed with our national reforms when you are thoroughly acquainted with them.”