"I'm not so philosophical. I feel the cold in winter, the heat in summer. Come, let us cross Teign and wind away round Batworthy to Kes Tor. There are alignments and hut circles and ruins of human homes there—granite all, but they spell men and women. I can tolerate them. They cheer me. Only sheep haunt them now—those ruins—but people dwelt there once; Damnonian babies were born there, and wild mothers sang cradle songs and logged little children in wolf-skin cradles and dreamed golden dreams for them."
"Nature was kind to those early folk."
"Kind! Not kinder than I to my cattle."
"They were happier than you and I, nevertheless. Happier, because nearer the other end of her chain. They had less intelligence, less capacity for suffering."
"That's a theory of Christopher's. He often wishes that he had been born thousands of years ago."
"Not since you promised to marry him," said Myles, with unusual quickness of mind.
"Perhaps not; but he's a savage really. He declares that too much work is done in the world—too much cutting and tunnelling and probing and tearing Nature's heart out. He vows that the great Mother must hate man and resent his hideous activity and lament his creation."
"One can imagine such a thing."
"And Christo says there is a deal of nonsense talked about the dignity of work. He got that out of a book, I believe, and took the trouble to remember it because the theory suited his own lazy creed so perfectly."
For once Myles Stapledon laughed.