nd
like some puzzling refrain, "It is still the same light. . . ."

"No woman believes these things," she asserted abruptly.

"What things?"

"No woman ever has believed them."

"You have to choose a man," said Verrall, apprehending her before
I did.

"We're brought up to that. We're told--it's in books, in stories,
in the way people look, in the way they behave--one day there will
come a man. He will be everything, no one else will be anything.
Leave everything else; live in him."

"And a man, too, is taught that of some woman," said Verrall.

"Only men don't believe it! They have more obstinate minds. . . .
Men have never behaved as though they believed it. One need not
be old to know that. By nature they don't believe it. But a woman
believes nothing by nature. She goes into a mold hiding her secret
thoughts almost from herself."

"She used to," I said.

"You haven't," said Verrall, "anyhow."

"I've come out. It's this comet. And Willie. And because I never
really believed in the mold at all--even if I thought I did. It's
stupid to send Willie off--shamed, cast out, never to see him
again--when I like him as much as I do. It is cruel, it is wicked
and ugly, to prance over him as if he was a defeated enemy, and
pretend I'm going to be happy just the same. There's no sense in
a rule of life that prescribes that. It's selfish. It's brutish.
It's like something that has no sense. I------" there was a sob in
her voice: "Willie! I WON'T."

I sat lowering, I mused with my eyes upon her quick fingers.

"It IS brutish," I said at last, with a careful unemotional
deliberation. "Nevertheless--it is in the nature of things. . . .
No! . . . You see, after all, we are still half brutes, Nettie.
And men, as you say, are more obstinate than women. The comet
hasn't altered that; it's only made it clearer. We have come into
being through a tumult of blind forces. . . . I come back to what
I said just now; we have found our poor reasonable minds, our wills
to live well, ourselves, adrift on a wash of instincts, passions,
instinctive prejudices, half animal stupidities. . . . Here we
are like people clinging to something--like people awakening--upon
a raft."

"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