“What do you think of this, by the way?” he said, reaching for his book. “You’d have no need to cool your ardent body by running out in the rain, if only we had a few more aeons of evolution behind us. Ah here it is!—‘The universe shows us two aspects: on one side it is physically wasting, on the other it is spiritually ascending.’ ”
Connie listened, expecting more. But Clifford was waiting. She looked at him in surprise.
“And if it spiritually ascends,” she said, “what does it leave down below, in the place where its tail used to be?”
“Ah!” he said. “Take the man for what he means. Ascending is the opposite of his wasting , I presume.”
“Spiritually blown out, so to speak!”
“No, but seriously, without joking: do you think there is anything in it?”
She looked at him again.
“Physically wasting?” she said. “I see you getting fatter, and I’m not wasting myself. Do you think the sun is smaller than he used to be? He’s not to me. And I suppose the apple Adam offered Eve wasn’t really much bigger, if any, than one of our orange pippins. Do you think it was?”
“Well, hear how he goes on: ‘It is thus slowly passing, with a slowness inconceivable in our measures of time, to new creative conditions, amid which the physical world, as we at present know it, will be represented by a ripple barely to be distinguished from nonentity.’ ”
She listened with a glisten of amusement. All sorts of improper things suggested themselves. But she only said: