of the lowliest
ancestry; that about our inward ears--I think it is--and about our
teeth, there remains still something of the fish, that there are
bones that recall little--what is it?--marsupial forebears--and
a hundred traces of the ape. Even your beautiful body, Nettie,
carries this taint. No! Hear me out." I leant forward earnestly.
"Our emotions, our passions, our desires, the substance of them,
like the substance of our bodies, is an animal, a competing thing, as
well as a desiring thing. You speak to us now a mind to minds--one
can do that when one has had exercise and when one has eaten, when
one is not doing anything--but when one turns to live, one turns
again to matter."

"Yes," said Nettie, slowly following me, "but you control it."

"Only through a measure of obedience. There is no magic in the
business--to conquer matter, we must divide the enemy, and take
matter as an ally. Nowadays it is indeed true, by faith a man can
remove mountains; he can say to a mountain, Be thou removed and be
thou cast into the sea; but he does it because he helps and trusts
his brother men, because he has the wit and patience and courage
to win over to his side iron, steel, obedience, dynamite, cranes,
trucks, the money of other people. . . . To conquer my desire for
you, I must not perpetually thwart it by your presence; I must go
away so that I may not see you, I must take up other interests,
thrust myself into struggles and discussions------"

"And forget?" said Nettie.

"Not forget," I said; "but anyhow--cease to brood upon you."

She hung on that for some moments.

"No," she said, demolished her last pattern and looked up at Verrall
as he stirred.

Verrall leant forward on the table, elbows upon it, and the fingers
of his two hands intertwined.

"You know," he said, "I haven't thought much of these things. At
school and the university, one doesn't. . . . It was part of the
system to prevent it. They'll alter all that, no doubt. We seem"--he
thought--"to be skating about over questions that one came to at
last in Greek--with variorum readings--in Plato, but which it never
occurred to any one to translate out of a dead language into living
realities. . . ." He halted and answered some unspoken question
from his own mind with, "No. I think with Leadford, Nettie, that,
as he put it, it is in the nature of things for men to be exclusive.
. . . Minds are free things and go about the world, but only one
man can poss