"Then they have better nightmares. How can you tell?"

The biologist was temporarily incapacitated, and the talk went on
over his prostrate attempts to rally and protest.

A second biologist seemed to Benham to come nearer the gist of the
dispute when he said that they were not discussing the importance of
men, but their relative inequalities. Nobody was denying the equal
importance of everybody. But there was a virtue of this man and a
virtue of that. Nobody could dispute the equal importance of every
wheel in a machine, of every atom in the universe. Prothero and
Carnac were angry because they thought the denial of absolute
equality was a denial of equal importance. That was not so. Every
man mattered in his place. But politically, or economically, or
intellectually that might be a lowly place. . . .

At this point Carnac interrupted with a whooping and great violence,
and a volley of obscure French colloquialisms.

He was understood to convey that the speaker was a Jew, and did not
in the least mean what he was saying. . . .


15


The second paper was an altogether maturer and more characteristic
production. It was no longer necessary to answer Prothero.
Prothero had been incorporated. And Benham had fairly got away with