cantilever bridges; on elaborate devices for bringing uninteresting
people nearer together; the ancients had been almost as foolish, because
they had mistaken the symbol for the thing signified. It was not the
material banquet which really mattered, but the thought of it; it was
almost as futile to eat and take emetics and eat again as to invent
telephones and high-pressure boilers. As for some other ancient methods
of enjoying life, one might as well set oneself to improve calico
printing at once.

"Only in the garden of Avallaunius," said Lucian to himself, "is the true
and exquisite science to be found."

He could imagine a man who was able to live in one sense while he
pleased; to whom, for example, every impression of touch, taste, hearing,
or seeing should be translated into odor; who at the desired kiss should
be ravished with the scent of dark violets, to whom music should be the
perfume of a rose-garden at dawn.

When, now and again, he voluntarily resumed the experience of common
life, it was that he might return with greater delight to the garden in
the city of refuge. In the actual world the talk was of Nonconformists,
the lodger franchise, and the Stock Exchange; people were constantly
reading newspapers, drinking Australian Burgundy, and doing other things
equally absurd. They either looked shocked when the fine art of pleasure
was mentioned, or confused it with going to musical comedies, drinking
bad whisky, and keeping late hours in disreputable and vulgar company. He
found to his amusement that the profligate were by many degrees duller
than the pious, but that the most tedious of all were the persons who
preached promiscuity, and called their system of "pigging" the "New
Morality."