"Those were days," said Sarnac, "of the profoundest ignorance about the body. The ancient Greeks and the Arabs had done a little anatomy during their brief phases of intellectual activity, but the rest of the world had only been studying physiology in a scientific way for about three hundred years. People in general still knew practically nothing of vital processes. As I have told you they even bore children by accident. And living the queer lives they did, with abnormal and ill-prepared food in a world of unchecked infections, they found the very tissues of the bodies going wrong and breaking out into the queerest growths. Parts of these bodies would cease to do anything but change into a sort of fungoid proliferation——"
"Their bodies were like their communities!" said Radiant.
"The same sort of thing. They had tumours and cancers and such-like things in their bodies and Cherry-Garden urban-districts on their countrysides. But these growths!—they are dreadful even to recall."
"But surely," said Willow, "in the face of such a horrible possibility which might afflict anyone, all the world must have wanted to push on with physiological research."
"Didn't they see," said Sunray, "that all these things were controllable and curable?"
"Not a bit of it," said Sarnac. "They didn't positively like these tumours and cancers, but the community was too under-vitalised to put up a real fight against these miseries. And everyone thought that he or she would escape—until it had them. There was a general apathy. And the priests and journalists and so forth, the common opinion makers, were jealous of scientific men. They did their best to persuade people that there was nothing hopeful in scientific research, they did all they could to discredit its discoveries, to ridicule its patient workers and set people against them."
"That's what puzzles me most," said Sunray.
"Their mental habits were different. Their minds hadn't been trained to comprehensive thinking. Their thinking was all in compartments and patches. The morbid growths in their bodies were nothing to the morbid growths in their minds."
§ 2
"My aunt in the hospital, with that lack of consideration for my uncle that had always distinguished her, would neither recover nor die. She was a considerable expense to him and no help; she added greatly to his distresses. After some days and at the urgent suggestion of my mother he removed himself from our sitting-room to a two-roomed lodging in the house of a bricklayer in an adjacent street; into this he crowded his furniture from Chessing Hanger, but he frequented my father's shop and showed a deepening attachment to my father's company.