. "It's the fashion now
to wear tufts of white hair among your own."

"If a cannibal cooked you _a la fricassee_, it wouldn't matter how you
looked!" growled Mrs. Stuart.

"Talking of desert islands," said the professor thoughtfully, "a very
interesting sociological problem might be solved if one had the time to
be shipwrecked and the courage to put my theory to the test."

"What theory is that?" demanded Grace, with languid curiosity.

The professor peered dubiously at both women over his gold-rimmed
spectacles, as if questioning their ability to grasp intellectual
problems of any nature. Then pedantically, pompously, as if addressing a
college class, he went on:

"Ethnology and sociology, as you are perhaps aware, are pet sciences
with me. I have always taken keen interest in studying man in his
relations to his fellow man, particularly in his relations with women."

He paused, as if afraid he had said something indelicate. Mrs. Stuart
sat up, made her pillows more comfortable, and said, with a laugh:

"This sounds interesting. Go on, professor!"

Thus encouraged, the professor continued:

"We must not lose sight of the fact that man as we see him
to-day--clean-shaven, manicured, trouser-creased--is only a step removed
from the naked savage ancestor who in the palaeolithic age emerged from
his cave, club in hand, to defend his family or provide it with food.
The man of the stone age tore flesh from the skeletons of wild animals
he slew, and made of his wife a beast of burden. To-day, our city
dweller employs a French _chef_, and buys for his wife a box at the
opera. Conditions have altered radically since the dawn of history,
thousands of years of education and refining influences have tamed the
primeval man and woman and taught them how to keep their instincts,
their passions, under control. Yet the change is far more apparent than
real. Civilization is purely artificial. It is only a compromise, a
convention. Our boasted refinement at best is little more than skin
deep. There's an old saying: 'Scratch a Russian and you'll find a
Tartar.' We might also say: 'Scratch civilized man and you'll find a
primeval brute.' Fundamentally, men and women of to-day are the same as
their savage ancestors, they are moved by the same impulses and desires
as when in the dark quaternary epoch they roamed naked through the
virgin forests, ferocious-looking and bestial in appetite, their matted
hair falling over their brutal f