'Dinner does come—ordinarily speaking. You've learned to expect it from the hunger. You could, of course, prevent it coming,' he added dryly, 'only that would be bad for you. You need it.'
Tom reflected a moment with a puckered face. His father waited for him to ask more, hoping he would. The boy felt the sympathy and invitation.
'Before,' he repeated, picking out the word with sudden emphasis, his mind evidently breaking against a problem. 'But if I felt hungry for something I hadn't had before——?'
'In that case you wouldn't call it hunger. You wouldn't know what to call it. You'd feel a longing of some kind and would wonder what it meant.'
Tom's next words surprised him considerably. They came promptly, but with slow and thoughtful emphasis.
'So that if I know what I want, and call it dinner, or pain, or—love, or something,' he exclaimed, 'it means that I've had it before? And that's why I know it.' The last five words were not a question but a statement of fact apparently.
The doctor pretended not to notice the variants of dinner. At least he did not draw attention to them.
'Not necessarily,' he answered. 'The things you feel you want may be the things that everybody wants—things common to the race. Such wants are naturally in your blood; you feel them because your parents, your grandparents, and all humanity in turn behind your own particular family have always wanted them.'
'They come out of the sea, you mean?'
'That's very well expressed, Tom. They come out of the sea of human nature, which is everywhere the same, yes.'