THE FIRE-TENDER. I'm not sure but here is where the ameliorations of
the conditions of life, which are called the comforts of this
civilization, come in, after all, and distinguish the age above all
others. They have enabled the finer powers of women to have play as
they could not in a ruder age. I should like to live a hundred years
and see what they will do.
HERBERT. Not much but change the fashions, unless they submit
themselves to the same training and discipline that men do.
I have no doubt that Herbert had to apologize for this remark
afterwards in private, as men are quite willing to do in particular
cases; it is only in general they are unjust. The talk drifted off
into general and particular depreciation of other times. Mandeville
described a picture, in which he appeared to have confidence, of a
fight between an Iguanodon and a Megalosaurus, where these huge
iron-clad brutes were represented chewing up different portions of
each other's bodies in a forest of the lower cretaceous period. So
far as he could learn, that sort of thing went on unchecked for
hundreds of thousands of years, and was typical of the intercourse of
the races of man till a comparatively recent period.
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