“But you do not understand women, my friend. Did we not bring you into the world? Are you not our sons, and therefore begotten to be kings? We may despise our husbands, we may loathe our brothers and our fathers, we women, but our sons are the gods we worship. My dear Mr. Percivail, women will go on being ruled to the end of time unless they cease populating the world with sons. The mother of the man is the humblest subject of the son and yet the proudest. The mothers of kings, of emperors, of presidents,--do they think of them as kings, emperors, presidents? No. They think of them as sons. That is why man is supreme. That is why he rules. To be sure, we women are not always disposed to have our husbands rule, we even go so far as to say they are not fit to rule, but alas, the men we are permitted to know the best of all are always the sons of some one else, and so there you have the endless chain. Sons! Sons! Sons! Sons to create new sons,--sons without end, amen! God bless our sons!”
“In that one little sentence, Mr. Percivail, spoke from the heart, you have reveal the secret history of the world. You have account for everything.”
“You are a million years old, Madame Obosky,” he said, looking into her deep, unfathomable eyes.
She smiled. “So? And which of my sons, Mr. Percivail, do you think I love the most? Cain or Abel?”
“It would take a woman to answer that question. There's one thing certain, however. You loved both of them more than you loved Adam.”
“True. But I followed Adam out of the Garden of Eden and I have never left his heels from zat day to this. What more could any man ask?”
On the second morning after the storm, the lookout fixed his straining eyes on a far-distant, shadowy line that had not been a part of the boundless horizon the day before. Dawn was breaking, night was lifting her sheet from the new-born day. He waited. He could not be sure. Minutes that seemed like hours passed. Then suddenly his hoarse shout rose out of the silence:
Down into the heart of the ship boomed the cry, taken from the lookout's lips by one after another of the weary men below. The sweating, exhausted toilers who manned the pumps paused for a moment, then fell to work again revitalized. Out from the cabins, up from every nook and corner of the ship scrambled the excited horde, fully dressed, their faces haggard with doubt, their eyes aglow with joy. Land! In every round little window gleamed a face,--for a moment only along the portside. Nothing but the same endless ocean on the port side of the ship. Water! Sick and wounded drew themselves up to the portholes and peered out from their cells for the first time.