Page:In the days of the comet.djvu/336

 It's like something that has no sense. I--" there was a sob in her voice3. "Willie! I won't."

I sat lowering. I mused with my eyes upon her quick fingers.

"It is brutish," I said at last, with a careful unemotional deliberation. "Nevertheless--it is in the nature of things. . . . No! . . . You see, after all, we are still half brutes, Nettie. And men, as you say, are more obstinate than women. The comet hasn't altered that; it's only made it clearer. We have come into being through a tumult of blind forces. . . . I come back to what I said just now! we have found our poor reasonable minds, our wills to live well, ourselves, adrift on a wash of instincts, passions, instinctive prejudices, half animal stupidities. . . . Here we are like people clinging to something--like people awakening--upon a raft."

"We come back at last to my question," said Verrall, softly; "what are we to do?"

"Part," I said. "You see, Nettie, these bodies of ours are not the bodies of angels. They are the same bodies--I have read somewhere that in our bodies you can find evidence 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 leaned