Hugh laughed serenely at his companion's vehemence. "Oh," he said, "I am a mild sort of socialist myself; that is, I see that it is coming, I believe in equality, and I don't question the rights of the democracy. But I don't pretend to like it, though I bow to it; the democracy seems to me to threaten nearly all the things that are to me most beautiful--the woodland chase, the old house among its gardens, the village church among its elms, the sedge-fringed pool, the wild moorland--and all the pleasant varieties, too, of the human spirit, its fantastic perversities, its fastidious reveries, its lonely dreams. All these must go, of course; they are luxuries to which no individual has any right; we must be drilled and organised; we must do our share of the work, and take our culture in a municipal gallery, or through cheap editions of the classics. No doubt we shall get the 'joys in widest commonalty spread' of which Wordsworth speaks; and the only thing that I pray is that I may not be there to see it." "You are a fine specimen of the individualist," said Sheldon, "and I have no desire to convert you--indeed we speak different languages, and I doubt if you could understand me; there is to be no such levelling as you suppose, rather the other way indeed; we shall not be able to do without individualism, only it will be pleasantly organised. The delightful thing to me is to observe that you are willing to let us have a little of your culture at your own price, but we shall not want it; we shall have our own culture, and it will be a much bigger and finer thing than the puling reveries of hedonists; it will be like the sea, not like the scattered moorland pools." "Do you mean," said Hugh, "when you talk so magniloquently of the culture of the future, that it will be different from the culture of the present and of the past?" "No, no," said Sheldon, "not different at all, only wider and more free. Do you not see that at present it is an elegant monopoly, belonging to a few select persons, who have been refined and civilised up to a certain point? The difficulty is that we can't reach that point all at once--why, it has taken you thirty or forty centuries to reach it!--and at present we can't get further than the municipal art-gallery, and lectures on the ethical outlook of Browning. But that is not what we are aiming at, and you are not to suppose that yours is a different ideal of beauty and sensibility from ours. What I object to is that you and your friends are so select and so condescending. You seem to have no idea of the movement of humanity, the transformation of the race, the corporate rise of emotion."