gs? We
may despise our husbands, we may loathe our brothers and our fathers,
we women, but our sons are the gods we worship. My dear Mr. Percivail,
women will go on being ruled to the end of time unless they cease
populating the world with sons. The mother of the man is the humblest
subject of the son and yet the proudest. The mothers of kings, of
emperors, of presidents,--do they think of them as kings, emperors,
presidents? No. They think of them as sons. That is why man is supreme.
That is why he rules. To be sure, we women are not always disposed to
have our husbands rule, we even go so far as to say they are not fit
to rule, but alas, the men we are permitted to know the best of all
are always the sons of some one else, and so there you have the endless
chain. Sons! Sons! Sons! Sons to create new sons,--sons without end,
amen! God bless our sons!"

"And I say God bless our mothers!"

"In that one little sentence, Mr. Percivail, spoke from the heart,
you have reveal the secret history of the world. You have account for
everything."

"You are a million years old, Madame Obosky," he said, looking into her
deep, unfathomable eyes.

She smiled. "So? And which of my sons, Mr. Percivail, do you think I
love the most? Cain or Abel?"

"It would take a woman to answer that question. There's one thing
certain, however. You loved both of them more than you loved Adam."

"True. But I followed Adam out of the Garden of Eden and I have never
left his heels from zat day to this. What more could any man ask?"

On the second morning after the storm, the lookout fixed his straining
eyes on a far-distant, shadowy line that had not been a part of the
boundless horizon the day before. Dawn was breaking, night was lifting
her sheet from the new-born day. He waited. He could not be sure.
Minutes that seemed like hours passed. Then suddenly his hoarse shout
rose out of the silence:

"Land ho!"

Down into the heart of the ship boomed the cry, taken from the lookout's
lips by one after another of the weary men below. The sweating,
exhausted toilers who manned the pumps paused for a moment, then fell
to work again revitalized. Out from the cabins, up from every nook and
corner of the ship scrambled the excited horde, fully dressed, their
faces haggard with doubt, their eyes aglow with joy. Land! In every
round little window gleamed a face,--for a moment only along the
portside. Nothing but the same endless ocean on the port side o