“I would not have you disparage the primitive instincts,” urged Mosscrop, with an air of solemnity. “My word for it, we should be an extraordinarily uninteresting lot without them. They are the abiding bone and flesh and muscle of humanity, upon which it pleases each foolish generation in turn to stretch its own thin, trivial pelt of fashionable convention. My desire to seize you, and drag you off to my own cave, and make a life’s business of keeping you there, always beautiful, always happy, always replenishing the well-spring of joy in my existence--you choose that as something typical of the primeval man surviving within me. Let me tell you, sweet little Vestalia, that the human mind would cease tomorrow from its eternal wistful dream of progress if it were not for the hope that advancing civilisation will bring improved facilities for that sort of thing. The world would wilt, and curl up like a sapless leaf, and drop from its solar stem into gaseous space, if that anticipation were taken away. The race keeps itself going only by cherishing the faith that sometime, somewhere in the golden future, this planet will be arranged so that the right woman will always get into the right cave. That is what people mean when they speak of the millennium.” “That is all very well,” said Vestalia, “but it deals with everything from the man’s point of view. Consider the other side of the case. What do you say to the woman’s disinclination for cave-life--is that not entitled to respect?” “Possibly,” answered David, reflectively--“if one were able to believe in it.” The waiter entered at this point with a burdened tray in his arms, and Vestalia took up the wine list. “Which is it that we had--that in the lovely high green bottles, with arms like a vase?” she asked Mosscrop. “We must have the same again.” “You have told me nothing as yet,” said David, reproachfully, when they were alone again, “of all the thousand things I long to know.” “It is so hard to tell,” she explained, with hesitation. “That is, there are things that I am supposed not to tell to anybody, at present, at least. And as for what I ought not to tell _you_--why I have been instructed to avoid you altogether. I was even told not to write you--but I did all the same--just once.” David took a crumpled envelope from an inner pocket over his heart, held it up for her inspection, and replaced it. But even as he did so sombre shadows began to gather on his face. He laid down his knife and fork, and, biting his lips, looked out of the window. Vestalia swiftly recalled gruesome associations with that look. She stretched forth her hand, and laid it on his arm. “You mustn’t look out there,” she protested. “It has a bad effect on you. Look me in the face instead--please!”