"Listen, Paul! After the seventh day 'God breathed the breath of life into Adam's nostrils.' He, therefore, was the first 'man,' for he had a God-given soul. In him was more of the divine than we can claim, for we are told that he could 'walk with God.' That was before the fall. Eve's fall, in the Garden of Eden, by this theory, was her guilty love for one of these soulless, earth-born 'men things,' and of them Cain was born. Born without a soul, and, as the Bible tells us, 'Cain went away and found himself a wife.' Where? Where else than from among these Sixth Day people, soulless, all of them, and their descendants could have brought into the world small trace of the divine. Meanwhile sons of Adam were beginning to people the earth, and later these two races mingled. There began a struggle between good and evil in the human heart, a struggle that has never ended. Sometimes will be born a human being in whom occurs a curious 'throw back' of generations to these soulless Sixth Day ancestors. Sometimes the good in us conquers the evil, and sometimes the evil conquers, kills the good, and the God-given soul leaves us and there is nothing left but an animal, a 'man thing,' a straight descendant of one of those Sixth Day horrors, whose blood has contaminated us since the fall of Eve." "Ah!" Dr. Crossett was bending forward now eagerly. "Your theory has taken me by surprise; it is new to me." "It is not new to the world, or at least not altogether new; some of the old German thinkers wrote of it. Darwin considered it. Each of us is conscious at times of sudden revolts against virtue, sudden reasonless impulses for evil. It is the struggle of the divided soul." "But, Martin, if your theory is sound, one or the other of these forces must conquer in the end, the good or the evil." "Evil never conquers in the end, Paul. Or our world would long ago have become chaos. When, in future generations, the last trace of our Sixth Day ancestors has been driven out, this theory holds that the world will once again be as God meant it to be, and we shall have the real brotherhood of Man." He paused. "What have you to say? What do you think?" "I think," replied Dr. Crossett, "that I should like a very large drink of your whiskey." "You are right, Paul," returned Dr. Barnhelm, rising. "A cigar, a drink, and a game of chess, they are a better prescription for a tired man than a new philosophy." He rang the bell and asked Maria for whiskey and a syphon, and as she went for it he took from a little wooden box a shabby, worn old set of chessmen.