The woman was little if anything over four feet in height. She was crooked, had a high shoulder, and walked like a crab, one leg being shorter than the other. Her companion walked quite straight, with a certain appearance of dignity which he neither assumed nor could have avoided, and which gave his gait the air of a march. He was not an inch taller than the woman, had broad, square shoulders, pigeon-breast, and invisible neck. He was twice her age, and they seemed father and daughter. They heard his breathing, loud with asthma, as they went by. “Poor things!” said Helen, with cold kindness. “It is shameful!” said George, in a tone of righteous anger. “Such creatures have no right to existence. The horrid manakin!” “But, George!” said Helen, in expostulation, “the poor wretch can’t help his deformity.” “No; but what right had he to marry and perpetuate such odious misery!” “You are too hasty: the young woman is his niece.” “She ought to have been strangled the moment she was born--for the sake of humanity. Monsters ought not to live.” “Unfortunately they have all got mothers,” said Helen; and something in her face made him fear he had gone too far. “Don’t mistake me, dear Helen,” he said. “I would neither starve nor drown them after they had reached the faculty of resenting such treatment--of the justice of which,” he added, smiling, “I am afraid it would be hard to convince them. But such people actually marry--I have known cases,--and that ought to be provided against by suitable enactments and penalties.” “And so,” rejoined Helen, “because they are unhappy already, you would heap unhappiness upon them?” “Now, Helen, you must not be unfair to me any more than to your hunchbacks. It is the good of the many I seek, and surely that is better than the good of the few.” “What I object to is, that it should be at the expense of the few--who are least able to bear it.” “The expense is trifling,” said Bascombe. “Grant that it would be better for society that no such--or rather put it this way: grant that it would be well for each individual that goes to make up society that he were neither deformed, sickly, nor idiotic, and you mean the same that I do. A given space of territory under given conditions will always maintain a certain number of human beings; therefore such a law as I propose would not mean that the number drawing the breath of heaven should, to take the instance before us in illustration, be two less, but that a certain two of them should not be such as he or she who passed now, creatures whose existence is a burden to them, but such as you and I, Helen, who may say without presumption that we are no disgrace to Nature’s handicraft.” Helen was not sensitive. She neither blushed nor cast down her eyes. But his tenets, thus expounded, had nothing very repulsive in them so far as she saw, and she made no further objection to them.