"So did I rebel, and I've been paying for it these sixteen years. Oh yes, I knew very little, but I rebelled against the little I knew. I did worse—I married. I did worse even than that—I married my first cousin."
He drew off, as if the better to watch the effect of his words. Ethan, looking at him darkly, felt there was a devilish ingenuity in his uncle's ignoring the possibility of any further mixing of Gano blood, and yet holding up his own misdeed as a hideous warning to the world in general, a thing of unmitigated evil.
"These matters were not understood in my day," he went on, "but happily the men and women of these times are not left in darkness."
"Oh yes, they are," said Ethan. "The men and the women are new, but the darkness is the old darkness."
"No; science has put it to rout. I had no one when I was young to tell me the things I'm telling you."
Ethan's face was undisguisedly satirical, but his uncle was oblivious.
"The Ganos have all been well-intentioned people, and yet they went on down there in Virginia and Maryland, generation after generation, marrying their own cousins, breeding in and in, till—well, you, for instance, and my children are more like brother and sister than cousins. You are even nearer than some brothers and sisters are. You each have in you the concentrated essence of a single family's strain. As I've told you, when I look at my innocent children, I could curse the eternal law that will not let me pay my debt alone. If we rebel"—he fastened his lean fingers on Ethan's shoulder again, and spoke with growing excitement—"if we rebel against that commandment, we and our wretched children are punished." He released his grip, but with eyes bloodshot, menacing, he stood over the young man still: "If we rebel, instead of dying out calmly and gently, we'll have to be stamped out."
"What do you mean?"
No lounging now; the young man sat arrow-straight and eagle-eyed.