wouldn't be a bad idea, I should say.

MR. Y. Yes, you can have your little jest about it!--And then they
cut down your food, so that every day and every hour you become
conscious of the border line between life and death. Every vital
function is more or less checked. You can feel yourself shrinking.
And your soul, which was to be cured and improved, is instead put
on a starvation diet--pushed back a thousand years into outlived
ages. You are not permitted to read anything but what was written
for the savages who took part in the migration of the peoples. You
hear of nothing but what will never happen in heaven; and what
actually does happen on the earth is kept hidden from you. You are
torn out of your surroundings, reduced from your own class, put
beneath those who are really beneath yourself. Then you get a
sense of living in the bronze age. You come to feel as if you were
dressed in skins, as if you were living in a cave and eating out
of a trough--ugh!

MR. X. But there is reason back of all that. One who acts as if he
belonged to the bronze age might surely be expected to don the
proper costume.

MR. Y. [Irately] Yes, you sneer! You who have behaved like a man
from the stone age--and who are permitted to live in the golden
age.

MR. X. [Sharply, watching him closely] What do you mean with that
last expression--the golden age?

MR. Y. [With a poorly suppressed snarl] Nothing at all.