to know they're debts.

GRANDMOTHER: (_momentarily startled_) Debts? Huh! More talk. You don't
owe any man.

SILAS: I owe him (_nodding to_ FEJEVARY). And the red boys here before
me.

GRANDMOTHER: Fiddlesticks.

FELIX: You haven't read Darwin, have you, Uncle Silas?

SILAS: Who?

FELIX: Darwin, the great new man--and his theory of the survival of the
fittest?

SILAS: No. No, I don't know things like that, Felix.

FELIX: I think he might make you feel better about the Indians. In the
struggle for existence many must go down. The fittest survive. This--had
to be.

SILAS: Us and the Indians? Guess I don't know what you mean--fittest.

FELIX: He calls it that. Best fitted to the place in which one finds
one's self, having the qualities that can best cope with conditions--do
things. From the beginning of life it's been like that. He shows the
growth of life from forms that were hardly alive, the lowest animal
forms--jellyfish--up to man.

SILAS: Oh, yes, that's the thing the churches are so upset about--that
we come from monkeys.

FELIX: Yes. One family of ape is the direct ancestor of man.

GRANDMOTHER: You'd better read your Bible, Felix.

SILAS: Do people believe this?

FELIX: The whole intellectual world is at war about it. The best
scientists accept it. Teachers are losing their positions for believing
it. Of course, ministers can't believe it.

GRANDMOTHER: I should think not. Anyway, what's the use believing a
thing that's so discouraging?

FEJEVARY: (_gently_) But is it that? It almost seems to me we have to
accept it because it is so encouraging. (_holding out his hand_) Why
have we hands?

GRANDMOTHER: Cause God gave them to us, I s'pose.

FEJEVARY: But that's rather general, and there isn't much in it to give
us self-confidence. But when you think we have hands because ages
back--before life had taken form as man, there was an impulse to do what
had never been done--when you think that we have hands today because
from the first of life there have been adventurers--those of best brain
and courage who wanted to be more than life had been, and that from
aspiration has come doing, and doing has shaped the thing with which to
do--it gives our hand a history which should make us want to use it
well.

SILAS: (_breathed from deep_) Well, by God! And you've known this all
this while! Dog-gone you--why didn't you tell me?

FEJEVARY: I've been thinking about it. I haven't known what to believe.