Page:The food of the gods, and how it came to earth.djvu/126

 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.

The two scientific men looked at one another. For a space only their eyes spoke.

"If the worst comes to the worst," said Redwood at last, in a strenuously calm voice, "I shall give the Food to my little Teddy with my own hands."