about the way he sat, about the forlorn droop of his shoulders, the set of his head upon them, that made her mad to throw her arms about him and pull him back into a live warm world. She relentlessly fought these impulses, the most powerful she had ever known, because she was so uncertain about him. She had not the faintest idea how far, if at all, he had committed his feeling to her.
Suddenly he swung round to her, taking his pipe from his mouth. He adjusted the rug which he had disarranged.
“You know, I was just wondering how far the human race might have got without words. Individuals can get on quite well without them. I got an amusing picture of everybody going about in a great silence, smiling, pointing, making signs, very restful, eh?”
“Why”—she was dislocated out of her own mood, “we shouldn’t have got very far with art, invention, all that we call civilization, should we?”
“We might have developed some other kind of civilization, a better kind. We haven’t done so much after all. We’ve learned a lot about comfort, something of beauty. We have learned to save life from some of its diseases, and words have been instrumental in spreading information about those things, yes.” He looked up at the sky a moment and went on as if he were talking to himself. “How little we have done after all. We can’t make a fine human being, the test, the real test. Nobody knows what will produce a Confucius or a Caesar. They just happen. Our great men are accidents, produced by so frail a chance that it is astonishing to contemplate it. The moods and senses, forced or spontaneous, of a couple of people with no notion of producing a hero, a fortuitous collaboration of passion and circumstance and a fragment of life force, and behold! a great man results. What a
