“No,” Theodore said, “I’ve forgotten.” He stared at the cowering, hunched figure with its shaking hands stretched to the blaze. The man, it might be, was mad as well as dying—he had met many such in his wanderings; babbling of verse as someone—who was it?—had babbled in dying of green fields. “‘My mind to me a kingdom is,’” the sick man repeated. “Well, even if we’ve forgotten who wrote it, there’s one thing about him that’s certain; he didn’t know what we know—hadn’t lived in our kind of hell. The place where you haven’t a mind—only fear and a stomach.... The flesh and the devil—hunger and fear; they haven’t left us a world!... But if there’s ever a world again, I believe I shall have learned how to write. Now I know what we are—the fundamentals and the nakedness....” “Were you a writer?” Theodore asked him—and at the question his old humanity stirred curiously within him. “Yes,” said the other, “I was a writer.... When I think of what I wrote—the little, little things that seemed important!... I spent a year once—a whole good year—on a book about a woman who was finding out she didn’t love her husband. She was well fed and housed, lived comfortably—and I wrote of her as if she were a tragedy. The work I put into it—the work and the thought! I tried to get what I called atmosphere.... And all the time there was this in us—this raw, red thing—and I never even touched it, never guessed what we were without our habits.... Do you know where we made the mistake?”—he turned suddenly to Theodore, thrusting out a finger—“We were not civilized—it was only our habits that were civilized; but we thought they were flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone. Underneath, the beast in us was always there—lying in wait till his time came. The beast that is ourselves, that is flesh of our flesh—clothed in habits, in rags that have been torn from us.” He broke off to cough horribly and lay breathless and exhausted for a time; then, when breath came back to him, talked on while Theodore listened—not so much to his words as to a voice from the world that had passed.