"Do you mean," asked St. George, "that we need not learn—as we understand 'learn'?"
"Precisely," said the prince simply. "You are accustomed, I was told in New York, to say that there is 'no royal road to learning.' On the contrary, I say to you that the possibilities of these children are in every one. But to my intense surprise I find that we of Yaque are the only ones in the world who understand how to use these possibilities. Our system of education consists simply in mastering this principle. After that, all knowledge—all languages, for instance—everything—belongs to us."
St. George looked away to the rugged sides of Mount Khalak, lying in its clouds of iris morning mist, unreal as a mountain of Ultima Thule. It was all right—what he had just been hearing was a part of this ultimate and fantastic place to which he had come. And yet he was real enough, and so, according to certain approved dialectic, perhaps these things were realities, too. He stole a glance at the prince's profile. Here was actually a man who was telling him that he need not have faced Latin and Greek and calculus; that they might have been his of his own accord if only he had understood how to call them in!
"That would make a very jolly thing of college," he pensively conceded. "You could not show me how it is managed, your Highness?" he besought. "That will hardly come in bulk, too—"
The prince shook his head, smiling.
"I could not 'show you,' as you say," he answered, "any more than I could, at present, send a wireless communication without the apparatus—though it will be only a matter of time until that is accomplished, too."
St. George pulled himself up sharply. He glanced over his shoulder and saw Amory polishing his pince-nez and looking quite as if he were leaning over hansom-doors in the park, and he turned quickly to the prince, half convinced that he had been mocked.
"Suppose, your Highness," he said, "that I were to print what you have just told me on the front page of a New York morning paper, for people to glance over with their coffee? Do you think that even the most open-minded among them would believe that there is such a place as Yaque?"
The prince smiled curiously, and his long-fringed lids drooped in momentary contemplation. The auto turned into that majestic avenue which terminates in the Eurychôrus before the Palace of the Litany. St. George's eye eagerly swept the long white way. At its far end stood Mount Khalak. She must have passed over this very ground.
"There is," the prince's smooth voice broke in upon his dream, "no such place as Yaque—as you understand 'place.'"