Page:In the days of the comet.djvu/338



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

Verrall leaned 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 various 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 possess a woman. You must dismiss rivals. We are made for the struggle for existence--we are the struggle for existence; the things that live are the struggle for existence incarnate--and that works out that the men stgruggle for their mates; for each woman one prevails. The others go away."

"Like animals," said Nettie.

"Yes. . . ."

"There are many things in life," I said, "but that is the rough universal truth."