’Vices and climes, climes and vices.  Always the same.  What were these climes and vices?’

‘Robberies of a hundred sorts, murders of ten hundred—­’

‘But what made them do them?’

‘Their evil nature—­their base souls.’

’But you are one of them, I am another:  yet you and I live here together, and we do no vices and climes.’

Her astounding shrewdness!  Right into the inmost heart of a matter does her simple wit seem to pierce!

‘No,’ I said, ’we do no vices and crimes, because we lack motive.  There is no danger that we should hate each other, for we have plenty to eat and drink, dates, wines, and thousands of things. (Our danger is rather the other way.) But they hated and schemed, because they were very numerous, and there arose a question among them of dates and wine.’

‘Was there not, then, enough land to grow dates and wine for all?’

’There was—­yes:  much more than enough, I fancy.  But some got hold of a vast lot of it, and as the rest felt the pinch of scarcity, there arose, naturally, a pretty state of things—­including the vices and crimes.’

‘Ah, but then,’ says she, ’it was not to their bad souls that the vices and climes were due, but only to this question of land.  It is certain that if there had been no such question, there would have been no vices and climes, because you and I, who are just like them, do no vices and climes here, where there is no such question.’

The clear limelight of her intelligence!  She wriggled on her seat in her effort of argument.

‘I am not going to argue the matter,’ I said.  ’There was that question of dates and wine, you see.  And there always must be on an earth where millions of men, with varying degrees of cunning, reside.’

‘Oh, not at all necessalily!’ she cries with conviction:  ’not at all, at all:  since there are much more dates and wine than are enough for all.  If there should spling up more men now, having the whole wisdom, science, and expelience of the past at their hand, and they made an allangement among themselves that the first man who tlied to take more than he could work for should be killed, and sent to dleam a nonsense-dleam, the question could never again alise!’

‘It arose before—­it would arise again.’

’But no!  I can guess clearly how it alose before:  it alose thlough the sheer carelessness of the first men.  The land was at first so vely, vely much more than enough for all, that the men did not take the tlouble to make an allangement among themselves; and afterwards the habit of carelessness was confirmed; till at last the vely oliginal carelessness must have got to have the look of an allangement; and so the stleam which began in a little long ended in a big long, the long glowing more and more fixed and fatal as the stleam lolled further flom the source.  I see it clearly, can’t you?  But now, if some more men would spling, they would be taught—­’