In the course of a day or so they had touched on nearly every phase in
the growth of Man and Woman from that remote and brutish past which has
left its traces in human bones mingled with the bones of hyaenas and
cave bears beneath the stalagmites of Wookey Hole near Wells. In those
nearly forgotten days the mind of man and woman had been no more than
an evanescent succession of monstrous and infantile imaginations. That
brief journey in the west country had lit up phase after phase in the
long teaching and discipline of man as he had developed depth of memory
and fixity of purpose out of these raw beginnings, through the dreaming
childhood of Avebury and Stonehenge and the crude boyhood of ancient
wars and massacres. Sir Richmond recalled those phases now, and how, as
they had followed one another, man's idea of woman and woman's idea of
man had changed with them, until nowadays in the minds of civilized men
brute desire and possession and a limitless jealousy had become almost
completely overlaid by the desire for fellowship and a free mutual
loyalty. "Overlaid," he said. "The older passions are still there like
the fires in an engine." He invented a saying for Dr. Martineau that the
Man in us to-day was still the old man of Palaeolithic times, with his
will, his wrath against the universe increased rather than diminished.
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