"Yes, yes. But your old families need a little new blood in them now and then, even if they have to come over here for it."
"For that and—your money—yes." Thryng laughed. "But these mountain people of yours, who are they anyway?"
"Most of them are of as pure a strain of British as any in the world—as any you will find at home. They have their heredity—and only that—from all your classes over there, but it is from those of a hundred or more years ago. They are the unmixed descendants of those you sent over here for gain, drove over by tyranny, or exported for crime."
"How unmixed in your most horribly mixed and mongrel population?"
"Circumstances and environment have kept them to the pure stock, and neglect has left them untrammelled by civilization and unaided by education. Time and generations of ignorance have deteriorated them, and nature alone—as you were but now admitting—has hardly served to arrest the process by the survival of the fittest."
"Nature—yes—how do you account for it? I have been in the grandest, most wonderful places, I venture to say, that are to be found on earth, and among all the glory that nature can throw around a man, he is still, if left to himself, more bestial than the beasts. He destroys and defaces and defiles nature; he kills—for the mere sake of killing—more than he needs; he enslaves himself to his appetites and passions, follows them wildly, yields to them recklessly; and destroys himself and all the beauty around him that he can reach, wantonly. Why, Bishop Towers, sometimes I've gone out and looked up at the stars above me and wondered which was real, they and the marvellous beauty all around me, or the three hundred reeking humanity sleeping in the camp beneath them. Sometimes it seemed as if only hell were real, and the camp was a bit of it let loose to mock at heaven."
"We mustn't forget that what is transitory is not a part of God's eternity of spirit and truth."
"Oh, yes, yes! But we do forget. And some transitory things are mighty hard to endure, especially if they must endure for a lifetime."
David was thinking of Cassandra and what in all probability would be her doom. He had not mentioned her name, but he had come down with the intention of learning all he could about her, and if possible to whom she was "promised." He feared it might be the low-browed, handsome youth bending over the garden beds beyond the hedge, and his heart rebelled and cried out fiercely within him, "What a waste, what a waste!"