Hugh blushed with pleasure, but he was taken back by Nutter's vigorous rejoinder. "Bunk!" he exclaimed. "Hooey! The sun, moon, and stars, and all that stuff sounds pretty, but it isn't life. Life's earning a living, and working like hell, and women, and pleasure. The 'Rubaiyat' 's the only poem--if you're going to quote poetry. That's the only poem I ever saw that had any sense to it. "Come, Beloved, fill the Cup that clears To-day of past Regrets and future Fears. To-morrow? Why, To-morrow I may be Myself with Yesterday's seven thousand Years. You bet. You never can tell when you're going to be bumped off, and so you might just as well have a good time while you can. You damn well don't know what's coming after you kick the bucket." "Good stuff, the 'Rubaiyat,'" said Ferguson lazily. He was lying on his back staring at the ceiling. "I bet I've read it a hundred times. When they turn down an empty glass for me, it's going to be _empty_. I don't know what I'm here for or where I'm going or why. 'Into this world and why not knowing,' and so on. My folks sent me to Sunday-school and brought me up to be a good little boy. I believed just about everything they told me until I came to college. Now I know they told me a lot of damned lies. And I've talked with a lot of fellows who've had the same experience.... Anybody got a butt?" Burbank, who was nearest to him, passed him a package of cigarettes. Ferguson extracted one, lighted it, blew smoke at the ceiling, and then quietly continued, drawling lazily: "Most fellows don't tell their folks anything, and there's no reason why they should, either. Our folks lie to us from the time we are babies. They lie to us about birth and God and life. My folks never told me the truth about anything. When I came to college I wasn't very innocent about women, but I was about everything else. I believed that God made the world in six days the way the Bible says, and that some day the world was coming to an end and that we'd all be pulled up to heaven where Christ would give us the once-over. Then he'd ship some of us to hell and give the good ones harps. Well, since I've found out that all that's hooey I don't believe in much of anything." "I suppose you are talking about evolution," said Ross. "Well, Prof Humbert says that evolutions hasn't anything to do with the Bible--He says that science is science and that religion is religion and that the two don't mix. He says that he holds by evolution but that that doesn't make Christ's philosophy bad."