“As long as they didn’t realize their advantage, it was all right. But one day a leader was born among them. I suspect it was the female half of him who discovered that they were superior to the gods. If they went about it right, they could capture Olympus, and send the gods to earth to toil and offer sacrifices. The one thing the gods cared about was having their vanity fed, by the smoke from countless altars. It was for this service that man was created, in the beginning. So, when it was reported on Mount Olympus that mortals aspired to be gods, Zeus conceived a way to avert the disaster, and at the same time have twice as many creatures on earth to offer sacrifices.
“He made a great feast, and invited all the insolent race of man. And when he had them at his mercy, so that they couldn’t escape, he had them brought to him, one at a time, and cleft them in two, vertically, so that they could look only in one direction, and run on only two feet—”
“O-wee-woo!” Theodora squirmed. “Didn’t they bleed ... terribly?”
“Hush, Theo, it’s only a story,” Mrs. Trench exclaimed, irritably.
“And that’s how a man and his other half came to be separated,” David said, drawing Theodora to him and stroking her pain-puckered brow.
“Yes, the gods thought they had destroyed man, when they cleft him in two,” Lary went on, his brown eyes shining. “But in that act of ruthlessness they sowed the seeds of their own destruction. When they hurled the mutilated creatures out of Paradise, most of the halves became separated. Then began the endless search for their other halves. The men realized that they couldn’t live up to their full capacity, with the feminine side of themselves gone. And when they did find each other, they experienced a rapture that surpassed the highest emotional possibility of the immortals. That thrill was love. The gods heard about it, and condescended to mate with mortals, in the hope of experiencing the thrill. But it was useless. They had not been separated from their other halves.”
“But how did they sow the seeds of their own destruction?” Judith asked.
“It’s the old story of the apple in the Garden of Eden. The thing they couldn’t get became the ultimate desideratum. They devoted all their energy to the quest of love. They deserted all their old godlike pursuits—and in the end, the Greek deities crumbled and were destroyed by the more vigorous gods of the barbarians.”
Theodora pondered the tale. She could not be satisfied by the application to Mr. and Mrs. Nims. The tub-like man, who was far more tublike in her imagination than Eileen’s exaggerated description should have warranted, was undoubtedly the man who was married to Hal’s sister. But Mrs. Nims was thin. And he was her second husband. Manifestly something was wrong.
“But Lary, suppose when those men tried to find their other halves, they couldn’t.... Their right halves had died, or had got tired of waiting and had gone off with some one else....”