IPPOLYTE Dufresne was warmly congratulated by his friends on his finishing the reading of his story.  
Nicole Langelier, applying to him the words of Critias to Triephon, said:
 
“You seem to have dreamt on the white stone, in the midst of the people of dreams, since you dreamt so long a dream in the course of so short a night.”
 
“It is not likely,” remarked Joséphin Leclerc, “that the future will be such as you have seen it. I do not wish for the coming of socialism, but I dread it not. Collectivism at the helm would be quite another thing than is imagined. Who was it who said, carrying back his thoughts to the time of Constantine and of the Church’s early triumphs: ‘Christianity is triumphant, but its triumph is subject to the conditions imposed by life on all political and religious parties. All of them, whatever they may be, undergo so complete a transformation in the struggle that after victory there remains of themselves but the name and a few symbols of the last idea’?”
 
“Must we then give up the idea of knowing the future?” asked M. Goubin.
 
But Giacomo Boni, who when delving down into a few feet of soil had descended from the present period to the stone age, remarked:
 
“Upon the whole, humanity changes little. What has been shall be.”
 
“No doubt,” replied Jean Boilly, “man, or ............