"Civilization," I repeated to myself. Then I looked at his eyes which hid carefully in their depths somewhere that tiny cherished flame I loved. "Your ways are really very simple," I said. "It's all easy enough to learn. It is so small."
"A man studying ants," he tinkled, "finds them small, but far from simple. You may find complications later. If so, come to me."
I promised him, and the fire gleamed faintly in his eyes a moment. "He entrusted you to me. Your mother," he added softly, "was the woman he loved."
"Civilization," I repeated, for the word set going an odd new rhythm in me that I rather liked, and that tired me less than the other things he said. "What is it then? You are a Race, you told me."
"A Race of human beings, of men and women developing——"
"The comely ones?"
"Are the women. Together we make up the Race."
"And civilization?"
"Is realizing that we are a community, learning, growing, all its members living for the others as well as for themselves."
Dr. Fillery told me then about men and women and sex, how children are made, and what enormous and endless work was necessary merely to keep them all alive and clothed and sheltered before they could accomplish anything else of any sort at all. Half the labour of the majority was simply to keep alive at all. It was an ugly little system he described. Much I did not hear, because my thinking powers gave out. Some of it gave me an awful feeling he called pain. The confusion and imperfection seemed beyond repair, even beyond the worth of being part of it, of belonging to it at all. Moreover, the making of children, without which the whole thing must end, gave me spasms of irritation he called laughter. Only the Comely Ones, and what he told me of them, made me want to sing.