"I'm not so sure of that," a light skirmisher broke his silence for the first time. "Do you mean to say," he asked of the first speaker, "that you would not mind being found dead in your bed to-morrow morning, and that you would rather like it if that were actually the end of you?"
The first speaker nodded his head over the glass he had just emptied, and having swallowed its contents hastily, replied, "Precisely."
"Then you have already, at your age, evolved that 'instinct of death,' which Metchnikoff, in his strange book, thinks the race will come to when men begin living rightly, and go living on to a hundred and fifty years or more, as they once did."
"Who is Metchnikoff, and what is the name of his strange book?" the light skirmisher cut in.
"He's the successor of Pasteur in the Pasteur Institute at Paris, and his book is called The Nature of Man."
"That blighting book!" One of the women who had caught on to the drift of the talk contributed this anguished suspiration.
"Blighting? Is it blighting?" the first speaker parleyed.
"Don't you call it blighting," she returned, "to be told not only that you are the descendant of an anthropoid ape—we had got used to that—but of an anthropoid ape gone wrong?"
"Sort of simian degenerate," the light skirmisher formulated the case. "We are merely apes in error."
The closest listener put this playfulness by. "What seems to me a fundamental error of that book is its constant implication of a constant fear of death. I can very well imagine, or I can easily allow, that we are badly made, and that there are all sorts of 'disharmonies,' as Metchnikoff calls them, in us; but my own experience is that we are not all the time thinking about death and dreading it, either in earlier or later life, and that elderly people think less about it, if anything, than younger people. His contention for an average life four or five times longer than the present average life seems to be based upon an obscure sense of the right of a man to satisfy that instinct of life here on earth which science forbids him to believe he shall satisfy hereafter."