His work had taken him into the Desert, far from the beaten tracks.  He described the life of the people, very little different from what it must have been in Noah’s time.  For months he had been the only white man there, and had lived among them.  What had struck him was how little he had missed all the paraphernalia of civilization, once he had got over the first shock.  He had learnt their sports and games; wrestled and swum and hunted with them.  Provided one was a little hungry and tired with toil, a stew of goat’s flesh with sweet cakes and fruits, washed down with wine out of a sheep’s skin, made a feast; and after, there was music and singing and dancing, or the travelling story-teller would gather round him his rapt audience.  Paris had only robbed women of their grace and dignity.  He preferred the young girls in their costume of the fourteenth dynasty.  Progress, he thought, had tended only to complicate life and render it less enjoyable.  All the essentials of happiness—­love, courtship, marriage, the home, children, friendship, social intercourse, and play, were independent of it; had always been there for the asking.

Joan thought his mistake lay in regarding man’s happiness as more important to him than his self-development.  It was not what we got out of civilization but what we put into it that was our gain.  Its luxuries and ostentations were, in themselves, perhaps bad for us.  But the pursuit of them was good.  It called forth thought and effort, sharpened our wits, strengthened our brains.  Primitive man, content with his necessities, would never have produced genius.  Art, literature, science would have been stillborn.

He hesitated before replying, glancing at her furtively while crumbling his bread.  When he did, it was in the tone that one of her younger disciples might have ventured into a discussion with Hypatia.  But he stuck to his guns.

How did she account for David and Solomon, Moses and the Prophets?  They had sprung from a shepherd race.  Yet surely there was genius, literature.  Greece owed nothing to progress.  She had preceded it.  Her thinkers, her poets, her scientists had draws their inspiration from nature, not civilization.  Her art had sprung full grown out of the soil.  We had never surpassed it.

“But the Greek ideal could not have been the right one, or Greece would not so utterly have disappeared,” suggested Mr. Allway.  “Unless you reject the law of the survival of the fittest.”

He had no qualms about arguing with his uncle.

“So did Archimedes disappear,” he answered with a smile.  “The nameless Roman soldier remained.  That was hardly the survival of the fittest.”