“But you must admit some men are taller than others?”
“Then the others are broader.”
“Some are smaller altogether.”
“Nimbler—it's notorious.”
“Some of the smaller are less nimble than the others.”
“Then they have better nightmares. How can you tell?”
The biologist was temporarily incapacitated, and the talk went on over his prostrate attempts to rally and protest.
A second biologist seemed to Benham to come nearer the gist of the dispute when he said that they were not discussing the importance of men, but their relative inequalities. Nobody was denying the equal importance of everybody. But there was a virtue of this man and a virtue of that. Nobody could dispute the equal importance of every wheel in a machine, of every atom in the universe. Prothero and Carnac were angry because they thought the denial of absolute equality was a denial of equal importance. That was not so. Every man mattered in his place. But politically, or economically, or intellectually that might be a lowly place....
At this point Carnac interrupted with a whooping and great violence, and a volley of obscure French colloquialisms.
He was understood to convey that the speaker was a Jew, and did not in the least mean what he was saying....