"Ah! Always throwing away your chances of winning that comet by wasting his time earning the gratitude of victims!" said the horrid William. "And now they have both left school, and are studying. My boy is practising sword-cuts, and reading about words of command, and linked battalions and machine-guns."
"HE'S KNOCKING DOWN ALL THE OTHER BOYS LIKE NINEPINS."
"And my boy is practising tying bandages, and reading about arteries, and nerves, and compound fractures, and epidemics. My boy is fitting himself as a Healer."
"And my boy," said William, "is fitting himself for a Slayer."
"You are either mad," said James, "or are indulging in a pastime which is not your forte—a jest. You cannot seriously imagine that these humans will actually prefer one who slays them!"
"I know they will—it just tallies with their queer ways. They profess to hold human life at the highest value! That's not humbug on their parts, mind you—they are under the delusion that they do so hold it. Life is to them an object of joy, and the absence of it one of regret; as I told you once before, they delight in the filling up of the waste places of their ball with human life. They don't consider animal life as life.
"If an island is full of intelligent elephants, who hardly ever make mistakes, and quiet, domesticated kangaroos, and contented rabbits, these humans of yours say: 'What a pity it isn't inhabited—we ought to people that desert!' They don't recognise the fact that it is inhabited and isn't a desert! They are delighted at the growing crowds in their towns; and if they look down a lane and don't see anyone in it, they drop a tear and think: 'It's very sad there should be no human life in that lane.'
"And here comes in one of the queerest phases in the exceeding queerness of these people of yours—all the while they are under the impression that they consider the increase of humanity as of the highest advantage, they have an unrecognised instinct which tells them that things will be mightily uncomfortable for them when their ball gets a little overfilled: and from this unrecognised instinct springs their partiality to anyone who thins them out. The Thinner-Out is the object of their very highest rewards——