a wearisome forefinger tried to pin Carnac
with questions.

"But you must admit some men are taller than others?"

"Then the others are broader."

"Some are smaller altogether."

"Nimbler--it's notorious."

"Some of the smaller are less nimble than the others."

"Then they have better nightmares. How can you tell?"

The biologist was temporarily incapacitated, and the talk went on over
his prostrate attempts to rally and protest.

A second biologist seemed to Benham to come nearer the gist of the
dispute when he said that they were not discussing the importance of
men, but their relative inequalities. Nobody was denying the equal
importance of everybody. But there was a virtue of this man and a virtue
of that. Nobody could dispute the equal importance of every wheel in a
machine, of every atom in the universe. Prothero and Carnac were angry
because they thought the denial of absolute equality was a denial of
equal importance. That was not so. Every man mattered in his place. But
politically, or economically, or intellectually that might be a lowly
place....

At this point Carnac interrupted with a whooping and great violence, and
a volley of obscure French colloquialisms.

He was understood to convey that the speaker was a Jew, and did not in
the least mean what he was saying....

15

The second paper was an altogether maturer and more characteristic
production. It was no longer necessary to answer Prothero. Prothero had
been incorporated. And Benham had fairly got away with his great idea.
It was evident to White that this paper had been worked over on several
occasions since its first composition and that Benham had intended
to make it a part of his book. There were corrections in pencil and
corrections in a different shade of ink, and there was an unfinished
new peroration, that was clearly the latest addition of all. Yet
its substance had been there always. It gave the youth just grown
to manhood, but anyhow fully grown. It presented the far-dreaming
intellectualist shaped.

Benham had called it ARISTOCRACY. But he was far away by now from
political aristocracy.

This time he had not begun with definitions and generalizations,
but with a curiously subjective appeal. He had not pretended to be
theorizing at large any longer, he was manifestly thinking of his own
life and as manifestly he was thinking of life as a matter of difficulty
and unexpected thwartings.

"We see life," he wrote, "not o