Seaton laughed heartily, pushing back with a ruffling hand the thick hair from his broad open brow.
"All three propositions are nil to me"—he said—"I suppose it is because I can have them for the asking! And what satisfaction is there in any one of them? A man only needs one dinner a day, a place to sleep in and ordinary clothes to wear—very little money is required for the actual necessaries of life—enough can be earned by any day-labourer. As for fame—whosoever reads the life of even one 'famous' man will never be such a fool as to wish for the capricious plaudits of a fool-public. And love!—love does not exist—not what I call love!"
"Oh! May I have your definition?"
"Why yes!—of course you may! Love, to my thinking, means complete harmony between two souls—like two notes that make a perfect chord. The man must feel that he can thoroughly trust and reverence the woman,—the woman must feel the same towards the man. And the sense of 'reverence' is perhaps the best and most binding quality. But nowadays what woman will you find worth reverence?—what man so free from drink and debauchery as to command it? The human beings of our day are often less respectable than the beasts! I can imagine love,—what it might be—what it should be—but till we have a very different and more spiritualised world, the thing is impossible."
Again, Gwent was silent for some minutes. Then he said—
"Apparently the spirit of destructiveness is strong in you. As 'master of the world'—to quote your own words, I presume that in the event of a nation or nations deciding on war, you would give them a time-limit to consider and hold conference, with their allies—and then—if they were resolved to begin hostilities—"
"Then I could—and WOULD—wipe them off the face of the earth in twenty-four hours!" said Seaton, calmly—"From nations they should become mere dust-heaps! War makes its own dust-heaps, but with infinitely more cost and trouble—the way of exit I offer would be cheap in comparison!"
Gwent smiled a grim smile.
"Well, I come back to my former question"—he said—"Suppose the occasion arose, and you did all this, what pleasure to yourself do you foresee?"
"The pleasure of clearing the poor old earth of some of its pestilential microbes!"—answered Seaton, "Something of the same thankful satisfaction Sir Ronald Ross must have experienced when he discovered the mosquito-breeders of yellow fever and malaria, and caused them to be stamped out. The men who organise national disputes are a sort of mosquito, infecting their fellow-creatures with perverted mentality and disease,—they should be exterminated."