At first McCann had raged inwardly at everything,--at the crowded treasures of art that filled the castle-like house, at the dominant luxury, at the opium, the wine, at all the unfamiliar splendour that surrounded Aurelian. He sat now listening unappreciatively to Aurelian's quiet voice discoursing lovingly of the Romanée Conti, which he himself could not have told from Mâcon. "There are not two dozen of this vintage in America outside of my own cellars," Aurelian had said, and the poor agitator heard him miserably. He did remember, indeed, when a slim glass of amber Madeira was placed on the Indian table by his side and its name given him, that some one had once told him that Constitution Madeira was last quoted in New York at seventy dollars a bottle, and so he drank his glass with a kind of distant wonder, but without pleasure; he thought it musty, he would have chosen Bass. Yet, even as he lay in the long Indian chair, the subtle influence of Aurelian's Lattakhia and of his ancient wine worked slowly in his system, and already he began to think with something approaching tolerance of his pupil's apostasy. He lay full length looking out over the carved balustrade through the silvery jasmine flowers amid their black leaves, to where the sky of blazing stars, already paling before the advancing day, ceased at the edge of the dark hills; and as he lay thus dreamily, he even wondered if he had realised all that there was in life, in his career of feverish action. Aurelian tossed the glowing end of his cigarette out through the jasmine leaves, watching it fall like a scarlet star. "Do you not see how it is?" he said; "I know to the full the grotesque hideousness of life as it is, and I long for revolution. But I have seen every man who is fired with desire to bring the change yield to the baleful influence of that which he would destroy until he has come to see no ideals save those of materialism. His ideal of life is a socialistic ideal of a dead, gross, physical ease and level uniformity; his ideal of government a democracy; his ideal of industry State factories with gigantic steam-engines,--his whole system but the present system with all its false ideals, deprived of its individualism. I have lived beyond this, I can see the futility of all these things. I believe only in art as the object of production,--art which shall glorify that which we eat, that wherewith we clothe ourselves, those things whereby we are sheltered; art which shall be this and more,--the ultimate expression of all that is spiritual, religious, and divine in the soul of man. I hate material prosperity, I refuse to justify machinery, I cannot pardon public opinion. I desire only absolute individuality and the triumph of idealism. I detest the republic, and long for the monarchy again."