“Absolutely,” I assented. “You ought to read a paper at the Royal Aquarium—before the Balloon Society, I mean.”
“And then look at this,” Uncle Dudley went on, with animation. “Now, you and I would ask ourselves what on earth such a gawky, spindling, poor-witted youngster as that thought he was doing among women, anyhow. But you turn over the page, and here you have it: ‘Goat-suckers, geese, carrion vultures, and many other birds of plain plumage have been observed to dance, spread their wings or tails, and perform strange love-antics.’ Doesn’t that fasten Hump to the wall like a beetle on a pin, eh?”
“But I am not sure that I entirely follow its application to your original point,” I suggested.
“About women, you mean? My boy, in science everything applies. The woods are full of applications. But seriously, women are different. As I said, in the barbarism at the back of beyond this divergence started. With the beginning of what we call civilisation, it became more and more marked. The progress of the separation increases nowadays by square-root—or whatever you call it. The sexes are wider apart to-day than ever. They like each other less; they quarrel more. You can see that in the Divorce Courts, in the diminished proportion of early marriages, in the increasing evidences of domestic infelicity all about one.”
I could not refrain from expressing the fear that all this boded ill for the perpetuity of the human race.
Uncle Dudley is a light-hearted man. He was not depressed by the apprehensions to which I had given utterance. Instead he hummed pleasantly to himself as he put Wallace back on the shelf. He began chuckling as a moment later he bethought himself to fill our glasses afresh.
“Did I ever tell you my cat story?” he asked cheerily, testing the knob to see that the door was shut. “Once a little boy came in to his father and said: ‘Pa, we won’t be troubled any more with those cats howling about on our roof at night. I’ve just been looking out of the upstairs window, and they’re all out there fighting and screaming and tearing each other to pieces. There won’t be one of them alive by morning!’ Then the father replied: ‘My son, you imagine a vain thing. When increasing years shall have furnished your mind with a more copious store of knowledge, you will grasp the fact that all this commotion and dire disturbance which you report to me only signifies more cats.’”
At this juncture the servant came in with the soda-water. We talked no more of science that evening.