'Because they were all such shocking cowards.'
'Oh, not all! not all!'
(This girl, I know not with what motive, has now definitely set herself up against me as the defender of the dead race. With every chance she is at it.)
'Nearly all,' said I: 'tell me one who was not afraid—'
'There was Isaac,' says she: 'when Ablaham laid him on the wood to kill him, he did not jump up and lun to hide.'
'Isaac was a great exception,' said I: 'in the Bible and such books, you understand, you read of only the best sorts of people; but there were millions and millions of others—especially about the time of the poison-cloud—on a very much lower level—putrid wretches—covetous, false, murderous, mean, selfish, debased, hideous, diseased, making the earth a very charnel of festering vices and crimes.'
This, for several minutes, she did not answer, sitting with her back half toward me, cracking almonds, continually striking one step with the ball of her outstretched foot. In the clarid gold of the platform I saw her fez and corals reflected as an elongated blotch of florid red. She turned and drank some wine from the great gold Jarvan goblet which I had brought from the temple of Boro Budor, her head quite covered in by it. Then, the little hairs at her lip-corners still wet, says she:
'Vices and climes, climes and vices. Always the same. What were these climes and vices?'
'Robberies of a hundred sorts, murders of ten hundred—'
'But what made them do them?'