‘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....  Cannot you see how that little argosy will go glittering up into the sky, twinkling and glittering smaller and smaller until the blue swallows it up.  They may succeed out there; they may perish, but other men will follow them....

‘It is as if a great window opened,’ said Karenin.

Section 9

As the evening drew on Karenin and those who were about him went up upon the roof of the buildings, so that they might the better watch the sunset and the flushing of the mountains and the coming of the afterglow.  They were joined by two of the surgeons from the laboratories below, and presently by a nurse who brought Karenin refreshment in a thin glass cup.  It was a cloudless, windless evening under the deep blue sky, and far away to the north glittered two biplanes on the way to the observatories on Everest, two hundred miles distant over the precipices to the east.  The little group of people watched them pass over the mountains and vanish into the blue, and then for a time they talked of the work that the observatory was doing.  From that they passed to the whole process of research about the world, and so Karenin’s thoughts returned again to the mind of the world and the great future that was opening upon man’s imagination.  He asked the surgeons many questions upon the detailed possibilities of their science, and he was keenly interested and excited by the things they told him.  And as they talked the sun touched the mountains, and became very swiftly a blazing and indented hemisphere of liquid flame and sank.

Karenin looked blinking at the last quivering rim of incandescence, and shaded his eyes and became silent.

Presently he gave a little start.

‘What?’ asked Rachel Borken.