Eustace laughed at this reply, as the neatness of it satisfied his somewhat cynical sense of humour. "Don't you feel nostalgia yourself, Mr. Gartney?" asked Lady Errington, arranging the lilies at her breast. He turned his expressive face towards her with a sad smile. "Not of this earth! I am like Heine, _un enfant perdu_, and have a home-sickness for an impossible world." "Created by your own fancy no doubt." "Yes! Though I dare say if my fancy world became a real one it wouldn't be so pleasant as this one. After all, Chance is the most admirable architect of the future. When men like Sir Thomas More, Plato, Bulwer Lytton and the rest of them, have indulged in paper dreams of ideal worlds, they have always committed the fatal mistake of making the inhabitants insufferable bores, who have attained perfection--and when perfection is attained happiness ceases." "How so?" "Because the greatest pleasure in life is work, and when perfection renders work unnecessary, life becomes a lotos-eating existence." "Well surely that is a very pleasant thing." "To the few Yes, to the many No! Some men need constant excitement to make them enjoy life. I can quite understand Xerxes offering a reward to the man who could invent a new pleasure, for if Xerxes had not attained the perfection of debauchery, he would not have found existence a bore." "You can hardly call such an ignoble height perfection," said Lady Errington quietly. "I should call it satiety." "No doubt you are right. But what does it matter what we call it? the thing is the same." "That sounds as if you spoke from experience, and at your age that can hardly be the case." "I remember," observed Eustace a trifle satirically, "that a short time ago you said you measured youth by experience not by age. It is the same with me, I am only thirty eight years of age, yet in that short time I have exhausted all that life has to give." "Surely not!" Eustace Gartney laughed in a dreary, hopeless manner that showed how truly he spoke. "I'm afraid it is," he remarked with a sigh. "I have been all over the world and seen what is to be seen. I have mixed with my fellow creatures and found the majority of them humbugs. I've been in love and been deceived. I've published books and been abused, in fact I've done everything possible to enjoy life, and the consequence is I'm sick of the whole thing."