It was the Village jargon, done into something near a masterpiece. Sue began to see as the film unrolled before her eyes, reel by reel, that Zanin had never for a moment lost his dream. Even now, merely sitting in that steep crowded gallery waiting for the first reel of the ten, Sue knew that he had never lost it. Nor had Peter. The thought was exciting. It brought the color back to her cheeks. Her lips parted slightly. She was feeling again the enthusiasm Peter's scenario had roused in her at the start, but with a new intensity. The Worm, at her side, watching every slight subtle change of that young face, forgot his own stirring news of the morning, forgot that he was Alexander H. Bates, and the expression of a man who had bcen long hungry crept into his eyes. The Nature film, you recall, pictured an imaginary people, simple, even primitive, untouched by what men call civilisation. To their secluded island comes the ship of an explorer, suggesting by its outlines and rigging and the costumes of officers and crew, the brave days of Captain Cook, or perhaps a period half a century earlier. The indefiniteness of it was baffling and fascinating. At no point did it date! And the island was not one of those that dot the South Seas, at least the inhabitants were not savages. They were intelligent, industrious, gentle. But the women hunted and fished with the men. Love--or passion, at least--was recognized for the impermanent gust it so often is--and, as such, was respected. No woman dreamed of tying herself for life to a lover she no longer loved. Neither want nor respectability could lower her pride to that point. Fatherhood, apparently, was not fixed, a hint being conveyed that the men as a group were bound to contribute to the welfare of young mothers. Thus the men were perhaps less glad and free than the women; indeed there was more than a suggestion of matriarchy.... To this community, thrown by an accident on its shores, the hundred odd men from the ship brought a habit of discipline, a holy book (that was and was not the Bible), a rigid marriage law, a complete hard theory of morality with attached penalties, plenty of firearms, hogshead upon hogshead of strong liquor, and underlying everything else an aggressive acquisitiveness that showed itself in the beginning as the trading instinct and later, of course, became politics and control.