"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 naive, 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?_" "Certainly." "But, my poor child," he said, "I am not what I seem. The joke is entirely on woman--poor, derided, deluded, down-trodden, humourless woman! Why, all this symmetry of mine--all these endearing young charms, are--are----" He hesitated, looked at her, reflected, wavered. She was _so_ pretty--somehow he didn't want to tell her. He felt furtively of his rubber chest improver, his flexible pneumatic calves, his golden brown wig, his pencilled brows, silky moustache, and carefully fashioned rosebud mouth. . . . A sudden and curious distaste for confessing to her that all the beauties were unreal came over him. Meanwhile, paying him no further attention for the moment, she was trying hard to uncork the bottle of chloroform. When she succeeded, she soaked the roll of antiseptic cotton, folded it in a handkerchief, and re-corked the bottle. Then, eyeing him coldly, holding the saturated handkerchief with one hand, her pretty nose with the other, she said with nasal difficulty: "Dow, Bister Lagdod, bake up your bind dot to struggle----" "Are you actually going to do it?" he asked, incredulously. "I ab!" she replied firmly. "Nonsense! _You_ are not accustomed to give chloroform!" "Do; but I've read up od the subject----" "What!" he exclaimed, horrified. "Look out what you're doing, child! Don't you dare try that on me!" "I've got to," she insisted. "Please dod bake be dervous or we bay have ad accidend----" "Take that stuff away!" he yelled. "You'll give me too much and then I won't wake up at all!" "I'll be as careful as I cad," she promised him. "Dow be still----"