Page:The world set free.djvu/307

 "It is still, so to speak, a mere laboratory triumph," said Fowler, "but to-morrow it will be practicable."

"You see," cried Karenin, turning a laughing face to Rachel and Edith, "while we have been theorising about men and women, here is science getting the power for us to end that old dispute for ever. If woman is too much for us, we'll reduce her to a minority, and if we do not like any type of men and women, we'll have no more of it. These old bodies, these old animal limitations, all this earthly inheritance of gross inevitabilities falls from the spirit of man like the shrivelled cocoon from an imago. And for my own part, when I hear of these things I feel like that—like a wet, crawling new moth that still fears to spread its wings. Because where do these things take us?"

"Beyond humanity," said Kahn.

"No," said Karenin. 'We can still keep our feet upon the earth that made us. But the air no longer imprisons us, this round planet is no longer chained to us like the ball of a galley slave

"In a little while men who will know how to bear the strange gravitations, the altered pressures, the attenuated, unfamiliar gases and all the fearful strangenesses of space will be venturing out from this earth. This ball will be no longer enough for us; our spirit will reach out