I was puzzled by the sight of creatures different from anything of which bone or fossil had told us, and yet seeming to be of an earlier world than mine. But perhaps they were later. There had been time for many changes since then. Then I caught sight of my companion’s foot, with its central toe. A grotesque resemblance struck me between the two feet. Had I witnessed a link which connected her through the changing millenniums with my earlier humanity? No, there was no other resemblance. The idea was absurd. Yet I gave her the thought when she asked it, though I meant it for her amusement only. She took it with an abstract seriousness, pausing before she answered, “You are giving me new thoughts, as you often do. The resemblance seems slight, and the connection unlikely. What is the shape of a foot, considered beside the other differences? In many ways we are less unlike to each other than is either to the creature we have been watching. But I have not thought of these changes. In many centuries there has been little difference in the sea-creatures. Perhaps such changes take place more rapidly on the land. Yet there have been changes in the sea, enough to show that such things are. “And if they be, they must have been in every grade of difference, and in others beyond thought or counting. Can we, who are the thoughts of God, imagine what He had not thought? Must it not be, if we think it?” I answered, “I cannot follow that. To the thinking of my kind, we are, in part at least, alien from, and displeasing to our Creator, Whose thoughts are very different from ours.” She replied, “You may be right. I have no opinion on that. For, to me, your thought has no meaning.” CHAPTER XI WAR I do not think that I should have been content to leave the argument, for it was ever our way to continue through disagreement or misunderstanding until we had arrived at a point of harmony, but that, at the moment, we both became aware of steps that were approaching to meet us. We had not gone many yards from the lighted doorway, and we withdrew against the wall in a common impulse of silence. The steps were evidently those of another of the Dwellers, and as he passed without apparently becoming aware of our presence in the darkness, and continued along the passage, we should probably have gone on our proposed way, as soon as the dangers of detection were over, had he not turned in at the open doorway, on seeing which we were at one in our inclination to return sufficiently to observe what would happen. We were well content that we had done this, when we observed him go to the living ball, and bend down beside it, putting a hand to the ground after removing the imprisoning ring, on which it began at once to clamber up the slanting arm, turning over with a ball-like motion, and perching on his shoulder, in the manner which we had observed already.