Page:The Great Secret.djvu/274

258 It is much easier to hark back to savage life than for savages to advance towards civilisation. Anatole did not take long to make fishing-tackle from the bones and sinews of the birds, nor implements of labour from the flints that surrounded them. What had taken primitive man ages to acquire he learnt to do very quickly.

They had thread and fish-bone needles to make sealskin moccasins, leggings and mantles long before their own clothes wore out. They also found mud-holes near the fresh water lakes and streams. This mud served them for soap, so that they could wash themselves—a very strict necessity to Eugene, who was dainty and cleanly in her habits, much more so than Anatole, who considered a roll in the sand and a plunge in the water, fresh or salt, was enough in the way of ablution.

How quickly they had both learnt to be natural. Modesty is no more natural than is morality; both are products of an artificial education, which outrages Nature at every turn. Yet love is always delicate, tender and considerate, and both were deeply in love, therefore they never relapsed into coarseness any more than the animals do. He was her god, whom she had learnt to worship, his hands, feet, arms and legs as well as his face. All that composed him were objects of adoration to her, as her dainty body was to him, a precious treasure to love and cherish. They babbled to each other, as the birds do during courting season, meaningless words of tenderness and adoration, praising each other's parts, as connoisseurs rave over old masterpieces, the colour, the texture, the form, and in this fashion they extolled the Maker of all these perfections.

If the Creator of the universe is capable of being flattered for His works, the repetition of lovers, so ridiculous to callous outsiders, must be a sweet pleasure,