“I should rather like Nietzsche right side up, I think. As he is standing on his head most of the time, it’s rather confusing. If it is a blind, unconscious force that has got hold of us, we get hold of it, and of ourselves, when we consciously use it for our own ends. But I’m not a bit a Nietzschian, Gavan, for, as an end, an Overman doesn’t at all appeal to me and I don’t intend to make myself a bridge for him to march across. Of course Nietzsche might reply, ‘You are the bridge, whether you want to be or not.’ He might say, ‘It’s better to walk willingly to your inevitable holocaust than to be rebelliously haled along; whatever you do, you are only the refuse whose burning makes the flame.’ I reply to that, that if the Overman is sure to come, why should I bother about him? I wouldn’t lift my finger for a distant perfection in which I myself, and all those I loved, only counted as fuel. But, on the other hand, I do believe that each one of us is going to grow into an Overman--in a quite different sense. Peter, too, will be an Overdog, and will, no doubt, sometime be more conscious than we are now.” Gavan glanced at her and at Peter with his vague, half-unseeing glance. “Why don’t you smile?” Eppie asked. “Not that you don’t smile, often. But you haven’t a scrap of gaiety, Gavan. Do stop soaring in the sky and come down to real things, to the earth, to me, to dear little rudimentary Overdogs.” “Do you think that dear little rudimentary dogs are nearer reality than the sky?” He did smile now. “Much nearer. The sky is only a background, an emptiness that shows up their meaning.” She had brought him down, for his eyes lingered on her as she leaned to Peter and pulled him up from his sun-baked recumbency. “Come, sit up, Peter; don’t be so comfortable. Watch how well I’ve trained him, Gavan. Now, Peter, sit up nicely. A dog on all fours is a darling heathen; but a dog sitting up on his hind legs is an ethical creature, and well on his way to Overdogdom. Peter on his hind legs is worth all your tiresome Hindoos--aren’t you, dear, Occidental dog?” He knew that through her gaiety she was searching him, feeling her way, with a merry hostility that she didn’t intend him to answer. It was as if she wouldn’t take seriously, not for a moment, the implications of his thought--implications that he suspected her of already pretty sharply guessing at. To herself, and to him, she pretended that such thoughts were a game he played at, until she should see just how seriously she might be forced to take them. VII