"I want to get up!" he shouted. "My position is undignified! Anybody'd think I was a prize animal. I don't like this poultry talk! I'm a man! I'm no bench-winner. And if ever I marry and p-p-produce p-p-progeny, it will be somebody I select, not somebody who selects me!"
The girl looked at him sternly.
"No," she said. "For centuries man has mated from sentiment and filled the earth with mental and physical degeneracy. Now woman steps in. It is her turn. And she flings aside precedent, prejudice, and sentiment—for the good of the human race! and joining hands with Science marches forward inexorably toward the millennium!"
The girl was so earnest, so naïve, so emotionally stirred by the picture evoked that she enacted in pretty gestures the allegory of womanhood trampling upon sentimental emotion and turning toward Science with arms outstretched.
Langdon, who had managed to sit up, regarded her with terrified interest.
"Would you be amiable enough to remove this net?" he asked, shivering.
"I shall take you before the Board of Regents of the New Race University. They will assign you a cave."
"This joke has gone far enough," he said. "Please take off this net."
"No. I am going to show the Regents what I caught."
"Me?"