He shook his head. "They don't want the sacred fire. They want the high-balls--and they have money enough to be drunk straight through the next world!" He was thoughtful. "They are the classics," he added.
I didn't see that he had gone back to my word. "Roman Empire, you mean?"
"No, the others; the old people we're bidding good-by to. Roman Republic! Simple lives, gallant deeds, and one great uniting inspiration. Liberty winning her spurs. They were moulded under that, and they are our true American classics. Nothing like them will happen again."
"Perhaps," I suggested, "our generation is uneasily living in a 'bad quarter-of-an-hour'--good old childhood gone, good new manhood not yet come, and a state of chicken-pox between whiles." And on this I made to him a much-used and consoling qu
