“Honestly?”
“Honestly.”
For a long time Charmian was thoughtful, a little pucker between her eyebrows. Then she resolutely shook her head, and her upper lip turned up a trifle in her characteristic smile.
“No, we’ve set our hands to the plough,” she said. “‘Go back’ is not in my lexicon.”
“I think,” Shonto returned, “that a half-hour or so of crawling on all fours under that tangle of branches will convince the two of us that we’ve never known fatigue before.”
“Which doesn’t mean that you’re not game, of course.”
“I am thinking more of you than of myself,” he told her.
“Don’t do that,” she requested. “I think I’ve shown that I’m pretty tough. And I’m of the opinion, Doctor, that I shall crawl better than you will. I have less weight to push along, and I’m somewhat of a tumbler, though I guess I’ve never told you. I can turn handsprings, do the cartwheel, and throw flip-flops forward and backward. My life has not been entirely wasted, you see. Besides all that, women are more primitive than men, both mentally and physically. I imagine that, ’way back in the misty ages when we were learning to pick up a club to defend ourselves instead of biting altogether, man was walking erect a long time before the female of the species stood up and tried the new fad. Don’t you know that a woman can sit down on the floor with more comfort than a man? You birds are over-civilized, and that’s what’s the matter with the world. Are you ready? Let’s go!”
In an hour Dr. Inman Shonto was ready to admit that her logic was sound. “You go back farther than primitive man,” he puffed, as he lumbered along after her. “You go back to when we were saurians wallowing in the slime and the seaweed. You’re a lizard.”
In the beginning he had taken the lead, but his slow, clumsy progress had nettled her.