“Mr. Ingledew,” Frida exclaimed, “do you know, when you talk like that, I always long to ask you where on earth you come from, and who are these your people you so often speak about.  A blessed people:  I would like to learn about them; and yet I’m afraid to.  You almost seem to me like a being from another planet.”

The young man laughed a quiet little laugh of deprecation, and sat down on the garden bench beside the yellow rose-bush.

“Oh, dear, no, Frida,” he said, with that transparent glance of his.  “Now, don’t look so vexed; I shall call you Frida if I choose; it’s your name, and I like you.  Why let this funny taboo of one’s own real name stand in the way of reasonable friendship?  In many savage countries a woman’s never allowed to call her husband by his name, or even to know it, or, for the matter of that, to see him in the daylight.  In your England, the arrangement’s exactly reversed:  no man’s allowed to call a woman by her real name unless she’s tabooed for life to him—­what you Europeans call married to him.  But let that pass.  If one went on pulling oneself up short at every one of your customs, one’d never get any further in any question one was discussing.  Now, don’t be deceived by nonsensical talk about living beings in other planets.  There are no such creatures.  It’s a pure delusion of the ordinary egotistical human pattern.  When people chatter about life in other worlds, they don’t mean life—­which, of a sort, there may be there:—­they mean human life—­ a very different and much less important matter.  Well, how could there possibly be human beings, or anything like them, in other stars or planets?  The conditions are too complex, too peculiar, too exclusively mundane.  We are things of this world, and of this world only.  Don’t let’s magnify our importance:  we’re not the whole universe.  Our race is essentially a development from a particular type of monkey-like animal—­the Andropithecus of the Upper Uganda eocene.  This monkey-like animal itself, again, is the product of special antecedent causes, filling a particular place in a particular tertiary fauna and flora, and impossible even in the fauna and flora of our own earth and our own tropics before the evolution of those succulent fruits and grain-like seeds, for feeding on which it was specially adapted.  Without edible fruits, in short, there could be no monkey; and without monkeys there could be no man.”

“But mayn’t there be edible fruits in the other planets?” Frida inquired, half-timidly, more to bring out this novel aspect of Bertram’s knowledge than really to argue with him; for she dearly loved to hear his views of things, they were so fresh and unconventional.