en run
away. Last of all they yield. These cells have it ingrained in them that
the woman-thing is only ready to yield after a chase. Very few people do
this consciously. A few do--people who have been let into the secret of
studying natural laws. Then they either do it for the fun of the chase,
or else because they're too morally lazy to fight the urge of the cells.
That's when they get holes torn in them."

He walked on for a few steps, and then turned to laugh into Marcella's
puzzled face.

"All of which, I'd like to point out, I take no credit for, Marcella. I
got it out of Kraill's Edinburgh lectures that have just been published
in book form."

"I hate that way of talking," said Marcella abruptly. "I like Wullie's
way best. He says lives are the pathway of life, just as you do. But he
says it's not just life, it's either God or beasts that walk along it
and we've to help God kill the beasts so as to leave the pathway clear
for Him. It means the same, but your way of saying it is so--so
ungodly."

"I know. But there it is. The way I talk is the way Kraill and his
school talk. Of course, there's something in it. There would be a great
deal in it if we were only aiming at making bodies. All this tricking
out--refinement--it may produce the people who tower over others--like
the Greeks with their 'pure beauty' you know--"

He stopped speaking suddenly and they walked on in silence while
Marcella looked eagerly from shop window to passers-by and back again.

"It's all wrong, doctor," she said at last. "It's too one-sided."

"Yes. And look at the Greeks now--"

She turned to him with a quick, birdlike glance.

"Do you know what I think?" she said.

"Not quite all of it," said the doctor, watching her face, and thinking
how incongruous it looked in Regent Street.

"Well, I think biology's one of the beasts we've to kill before God
walks along us. So there! Tropical forests--maggots--women," she added,
and the doctor laughed outright.

The chief impression she got of London was its aimlessness. It reminded
her irresistibly of an ant-hill she had seen disturbed once. Myriads of
tiny creatures had scurried passionately, exhaustingly, after each other
to and fro, no whence and no whither; the people thronging out of shops
and offices at dusk frightened her: there seemed so many of them, and,
looking at their tired, strained faces and their unkingly way of
hurrying along, uninterested and uninteresting save in