ciously:

"In the beginning these arms and legs of yours were nothing but
appliances for hanging from trees and running away from wild beasts.
Your body was merely a convenient case for a machine that kept your
life ticking along. How does one get the idea that all this is
good-looking? Ages ago men decided to think so for reasons that have
nothing to do with esthetics; they passed the hoax on, and in time
these physical features got themselves surrounded with a perfect fog of
sentimental and romantic balderdash. Take your face. Your nose is
bridged in that so-called ravishing way in order to let a stream of air
into your lungs. Your eyebrows--how many sonnets have been written on
eyebrows!--are there, in the first place, to keep the perspiration from
running into your eyes. Your lips are merely a binding against the
friction of food. How grotesque to find such expedients beautiful! No
doubt in other planets there are creatures that you'd call monsters;
and they'd call you hideous. In fact, there can't be any such thing as
beauty."

"No doubt you're right, Cornie dear," she responded, looking down at
her beautiful hands.

"And what's it all for?" he ejaculated, in a stupefied kind of horror.
"All this sordid consolidation of flesh and blood, this disgusting
hallucination of attractiveness? All for----"

"I know," she assented. "More Lillas, ad infinitum. Isn't it
tiresome?"

He jumped up, with a groan:

"I could kill you!"

"Too late. You ought to have done it when we were children together."

"Yes, too late, too late."

He wandered round the room, slapping one fist into the other, glaring
at the walls, from which old-time ladies simpered vapidly at him. His
brain seemed to be whirling round in his skull; his vision became
blurred; and he had a dreadful apprehension of losing contact with
normality. But normality, too--what was it? Normality was being
natural! He came toward her; she rose and recoiled; but he caught hold
of her arms above the elbows, and held her fast when she swayed back
from him with a long shimmer of her copper-colored gown.

"You're hurting me, Cornie. And there's the bell," she muttered, her
heart going dead.

He released her with the gesture of a man who hurls an enemy over a
precipice. He gasped:

"One of these days!"

And with a livid smile he left the room as David Verne appeared in the
doorway, in his wheel chair, propelled by Hamoud.

But David, too, was