this time I will make a rational creature of my own. After all, what is ten years? Man has been a hundred thousand in the making."
He thought darkly. "But I am drawing near the fastness. This puma of mine.…"
After a silence: "And they revert. As soon as my hand is taken from them the beast begins to creep back, begins to assert itself again.…"
Another long silence.
"Then you take the things you make into those dens?" said I.
"They go. I turn them out when I begin to feel the beast in them, and presently they wander there. They all dread this house and me. There is a kind of travesty of humanity over there. Montgomery knows about it, for he interferes in their affairs. He has trained one or two of them to our service. He's ashamed of it, but I believe he half likes some of these beasts. It's his business, not mine. They only sicken me with a sense of failure. I take no interest in them. I fancy they follow in the lines the Kanaka missionary marked out, and have a kind of mockery of a rational life—poor beasts! There's something they call the Law. Sing hymns about 'all thine.' They build themselves their dens, gather fruit and pull herbs—marry even. But I can see through it all, see into their very souls, and see there nothing but the souls of beasts, beasts that perish—anger, and the lusts to live and gratify themselves.… Yet they're odd. Complex, like everything else alive. There is a kind of upward striving in them, part vanity, part waste sexual emotion, part waste curiosity. It only mocks
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