Page:The Works of H G Wells Volume 5.pdf/132

 know. All sorts of people. The Society for the Preservation of Ancient Statures is going to have Mr. Frederick Harrison on the council, they say. You know he's written an essay about it; says it is vulgar, and entirely inharmonious with that Revelation of Humanity that is found in the teachings of Comte. It is the sort of thing the Eighteenth Century couldn't have produced even in its worst moments. The idea of the Food never entered the head of Comte—which shows how wicked it really is. No one, he says, who really understood Comte"

"But you don't mean to say—" said Redwood, alarmed out of his disdain for Winkles.

"They'll not do all that," said Winkles. "But public opinion is public opinion, and votes are votes. Everybody can see you are up to a disturbing thing. And the human instinct is all against disturbance, you know. Nobody seems to believe Caterham's idea of people thirty-seven feet high, who won't be able to get inside a church, or a meeting-house, or any social or human institution. But for all that they're not so easy in their minds about it. They see there's something, something more than a common discovery"

"There is," said Redwood, "in every discovery."

"Anyhow, they're getting—restive. Caterham keeps harping on what may happen if it gets loose again. I say over and over again it won't and it can't. But—there it is!"

And he bounced about the room for a little while as if he meant to reopen the topic of the secret, and then thought better of it and went.