VII

“Connie says people like wisps of smoke, and Olive says immunised women, and babies in bottles, and Dukes says the phallus is the bridge to what comes next. I wonder what it will really be?” said Clifford.

“Oh, don’t bother! let’s get on with today,” said Olive. “Only hurry up with the breeding bottle, and let us poor women off.”

“There might even be real men, in the next phase,” said Tommy. “Real, intelligent, wholesome men, and wholesome nice women! Wouldn’t that be a change, an enormous change from us? We’re not men, and the women aren’t women. We’re only cerebrating makeshifts, mechanical and intellectual experiments. There may even come a civilization of genuine men and women, instead of our little lot of clever-jacks, all at the intelligence-age of seven. It would be even more amazing than men of smoke or babies in bottles.”

“Oh, when people begin to talk about real women, I give up,” said Olive.

“Certainly nothing but the spirit in us is worth having,” said Winterslow.

“Spirits!” said Jack, drinking his whiskey and soda.

“Think so? Give me the resurrection of the body!” said Dukes. “But it’ll come, in time, when we’ve shoved the cerebral stone away a bit, the money and the rest. Then we’ll get a democracy of touch, instead of a democracy of pocket.”

Something echoed inside Connie: “Give me the democracy of touch, the resurrection of the body!” She didn’t at all know what it meant, but it comforted her, as meaningless things may do.

Anyhow everything was terribly silly, and she was exasperatedly bored by it all, by Clifford, by Aunt Eva, by Olive and Jack, and Winterslow, and even by Dukes. Talk, talk, talk! What hell it was, the continual rattle of it!