Page:Harvey O'Higgins--Don-a-dreams.djvu/252

 we don't do anything wrong—anything to be ashamed of—anything" He made a gesture that expressed nothing at all.

"Yes," she said. "A hundred years from now!" She gazed out over the valley, thinking of the crowded cemeteries she had passed in the street-car. She sighed. "I wonder where we'll be in a hundred years from now."

It was after a musing silence that he replied: "I wish I knew."

"They were happier," she said, "those people in the graveyards. They had something to believe in." She came out of her reverie to find him leaning towards her across the table, saying excitedly: "So have we!"

She stared at him. "What?"

"Something to believe in."

She did not reply.

"I know," he said. "I've felt about it just as you do. But look here: if man was an ape, once, if he lived in caves, if he was the savage brute that the Fiji Islanders are now, he rose above it, didn't he? He grew, and he found out the laws that governed his growth, and he wrote them down, and enforced them, and made a religion of them—didn't he? Well, to me, those laws are as real as the laws of gravity—every bit! And there's something behind them just as sure as there's matter behind the law of gravity. Yes. They can deny that. Let them! They have to live in accordance with those laws, and they know it. And so do we. If we do what's wrong, we'll suffer for it—in ourselves—just the same as we'd suffer in our bodies if we didn't obey the laws of hygiene! We"