“I didn’t say that.”

“‘An untested hypothesis,’” he quoted teasingly, but with a stirring anger.

“I don’t know about that, either.  We’re both bound by our profession to admit an empirical test.  And if we human beings can’t survive without God——­”

“But we can—­we do.”

“I can’t.”

He threw up his head.

“Why do women always become personal when they argue?”

“And why do rationalists always become irrational?”

They walked on slowly, apart, vaguely afraid.  He wanted to change the subject, to take her by the arm and hold her fast.  For she was drifting away from him.  Her voice sounded remote and troubling, like a little old tune that he could not quite remember.  Its emotion fretted his overstrained nerves.  He wanted to close his ears against it.  It was a trivial tune which might become a torment.

“It’s not only me.  It’s everyone.  Most of us are frightfully unhappy.  Don’t you realize that?  And the more we understand life the more desperate we get.  Savages and children may do without a god, but we can’t.  We know too much.  Even the stupidest—­the most careless of us.  Think of Howard and Gertie and all that lot.  Every second word is ‘What’s the good?  What’s it all about?’ They make a great deal of noise to cover up their unhappiness.  They’re terrified of loneliness and silence.  And one day it’ll have to be faced.”

“Oh, if you’re going to take Howard as an example—­” he interrupted.

“—­and Rufus Cosgrave,” she added.

He laughed with a boyish malice.

“Cosgrave doesn’t need a god.  He’s got me.  I’ll look after him.”

“You think you can?  And then we ourselves.  We’re different, aren’t we?  We’ve got our work.  We’re going to do big things.  For whom?—­for what?  For our fellow-creatures?  But if we don’t care for our fellow-creatures?  And we don’t, do we?  Not naturally.  The Brotherhood of Man is just dangerous nonsense.  Naturally men loathe one another in the mass.  How can we pretend to love some of those people we see every day in the wards with their terrible faces—­their terrible minds?  But the idea of God does somehow translate them—­it gets underneath the ugliness—­they do become in some mystic way my brothers and my sisters.”

He found it strangely difficult to answer calmly.  It would have been easier to have bludgeoned her into silence by a shouted “It’s all snivelling, wretched rot!” like an angry schoolboy.  He did not know why he was so angry.  Perhaps Ricardo was right.  It was something vital.  He could feel the old man’s shadow at his side, his hand plucking his sleeve, urging him on, claiming his loyalty.  They were allies fighting together against a poisonous miasma that sapped men’s brains—­their intellectual integrity.

“Piling one fallacy on another isn’t argument, Francey.  We don’t need to like our fellow-creatures.  It’s a mistake to care.  Emotion upsets one’s judgment.  Scientists—­the best men in the profession—­try to eliminate personal feeling altogether.  They’re out for knowledge for its own sake.  That’s good enough for them.”