"Ah, the future of Russia is as much an unknown quantity as the future of womanhood. Personally I am convinced that the next great civilization will be Slavonic, and my chief grudge against mortality is that I must die long before it even begins to draw near, for it is still as far away as Johannine Christianity will be from the Petrine Christianity to which we have been too long devoted. But when it does come, I am sure that it will easily surpass all previous civilizations, because I believe it will resolve the eternal dualism in humanity that hitherto we have expressed roughly by Empire and Papacy or by Church and State. I envisage Russia as containing the civilization of the soul, though God knows through what agony of blood and tears it may have to pass before it can express what it contains. In Russia there still exists a genuine worship of the Czar as a superior being, and a nation that respects the divinity about a king is still as deep in the mire of fetichism as the most debased Melanesians. We worship kings in England, I admit, but only snobbishly; we significantly call the pound a sovereign. Not even our most exalted snobs dream of paying divine honors to kingship; we are too much heirs of Imperial Rome for that. I always attribute Magna Charta to an inherited consciousness of Cæsarian excesses." "And now you've only Austria left," said Sylvia. "Austria," Hazlewood exclaimed. "A battered cocotte who sustains herself by devoting to pietism the settlements of her numerous lovers--a cocotte with a love of finery, a profound cynicism, and an acquired deportment. Austria! rouged and raddled, plumped and corseted, a suitable mistress for that licentious but still tragic old buffoon who rules her." "What a wonderful sermon on so slight a text as a friend's asking a Serbian waiter for salt," Sylvia said. "Ah, you led me away from the main thread by asking me direct questions. I meant to confine myself to England." "_On peut toujours revenir aux moutons_" Sylvia said. "New Zealand mutton, eh?" Hazlewood laughed. "Wasn't it a New Zealander who was to meditate upon the British Empire a thousand years hence amid the ruins of St. Paul's?" "Well, go on," she urged. "You're one of those listening sirens so much more fatal than the singing variety," he laughed. "Oh, but I'm very rarely a good listener," she protested. Hazlewood bowed. "And don't forget that sirens have always an _arrière-pensée_," she went on. "However well you talk, you'll find that I shall demand something in return for my attention. Don't look alarmed; it won't involve you personally."