“We come back at last to my question,” said Verrall, softly; “what are we to do?”

“Part,” I said.  “You see, Nettie, these bodies of ours are not
the bodies of angels.  They are the same bodies------ I have read
somewhere that in our bodies you can find evidence of the lowliest
ancestry; that about our inward ears—­I think it is—­and about our
teeth, there remains still something of the fish, that there are
bones that recall little—­what is it?—­marsupial forebears—­and
a hundred traces of the ape.  Even your beautiful body, Nettie,
carries this taint.  No!  Hear me out.”  I leant forward earnestly. 
“Our emotions, our passions, our desires, the substance of them,
like the substance of our bodies, is an animal, a competing thing, as
well as a desiring thing.  You speak to us now a mind to minds—­one
can do that when one has had exercise and when one has eaten, when
one is not doing anything—­but when one turns to live, one turns
again to matter.”

“Yes,” said Nettie, slowly following me, “but you control it.”

“Only through a measure of obedience.  There is no magic in the business—­to conquer matter, we must divide the enemy, and take matter as an ally.  Nowadays it is indeed true, by faith a man can remove mountains; he can say to a mountain, Be thou removed and be thou cast into the sea; but he does it because he helps and trusts his brother men, because he has the wit and patience and courage to win over to his side iron, steel, obedience, dynamite, cranes, trucks, the money of other people. . . .  To conquer my desire for you, I must not perpetually thwart it by your presence; I must go away so that I may not see you, I must take up other interests, thrust myself into struggles and discussions------”

“And forget?” said Nettie.

“Not forget,” I said; “but anyhow—­cease to brood upon you.”

She hung on that for some moments.

“No,” she said, demolished her last pattern and looked up at Verrall as he stirred.

Verrall leant forward on the table, elbows upon it, and the fingers of his two hands intertwined.

“You know,” he said, “I haven’t thought much of these things.  At school and the university, one doesn’t. . . .  It was part of the system to prevent it.  They’ll alter all that, no doubt.  We seem”—­he thought—­“to be skating about over questions that one came to at last in Greek—­with variorum readings—­in Plato, but which it never occurred to any one to translate out of a dead language into living realities. . . .”  He halted and answered some unspoken question from his own mind with, “No.  I think with Leadford, Nettie, that, as he put it, it is in the nature of things for men to be exclusive. . . .  Minds are free things and go about the world, but only one man can possess a woman.  You must dismiss rivals.  We are made for the struggle for existence—­we are the struggle for existence; the things that live are the struggle for existence incarnate—­and that works out that the men struggle for their mates; for each woman one prevails.  The others go away.”