assertive lines. He would not pause to see how little we knew.
Sometimes his wit rose so high that he would lose sight of it
himself, and then he would pause, purse his lips as if he whistled,
and then till the bird came back to the lure, fill his void mouth
with grapes. He talked of the relations of the sexes, and love--a
passion he held in great contempt as being in its essence complex
and disingenuous--and afterwards we found we had learnt much of what
the marriage laws of Utopia allow and forbid.

"A simple natural freedom," he said, waving a grape in an
illustrative manner, and so we gathered the Modern Utopia did not at
any rate go to that. He spoke, too, of the regulation of unions, of
people who were not allowed to have children, of complicated rules
and interventions. "Man," he said, "had ceased to be a natural
product!"

We tried to check him with questions at this most illuminating
point, but he drove on like a torrent, and carried his topic out of
sight. The world, he held, was overmanaged, and that was the root of
all evil. He talked of the overmanagement of the world, and among
other things of the laws that would not let a poor simple idiot, a
"natural," go at large. And so we had our first glimpse of what
Utopia did with the feeble and insane. "We make all these
distinctions between man and man, we exalt this and favour that, and
degrade and seclude that; we make birth artificial, life artificial,
death artificial."

"You say _We_," said I, with the first glimmering of a new idea,
"but _you_ don't participate?"