See how his ears are pricked for every tremor of opinion, how he laps up the public's whims, to regurgitate them later as his own God-given gospel."

I laughed, and was at ease, sharing the superiority of this little hawk on its high perch; or watching this queerly sophisticated terrier sniffing out vermin.

He continued. "Next I undress them, and see them all nakedly huddled together. And of course naked they really are. That woman with the creased face and bloody claws-I take off her fashioned dress and corsets to observe the sagging belly, the flapping dugs like empty hot-water bottles. The paunched headman, stripped of all trappings, becomes a sheer grizzled human gorilla. That young bitch of the species, all sexed up for market, is now unpainted, unpermed, disheveled, grimy with soot and grease and blood from her savage cooking. And how she stinks! Yet to the prime young male, there, the slut is a seductive morsel. See how he leans toward her! His nakedness betrays an excitement which clothes conveniently mask."

I was enjoying his fantasy. It appealed strongly to the terrier in myself. But a vague protest was brewing in me. I thought of you, so real in person; beneath your simplicity, so complex; in all your doing, so well orientated to the spirit. Did this young man, I wondered, suppose that by stripping the human onion of its coats he would expose some indestructible core of brute humanity?

He continued. "The next gambit goes deeper. Take away from each of them all that is human. But preserve for identification some characteristic feature of each individual; for instance, that paunch, and that priestly dignity, and that lusty musculature. Let us operate on the asking bitch there. We must recreate the ape in her, or at least the subhuman, while somehow preserving the demurely lascivious expression of her whole face. First, then, thicken her, bandy her legs, tip her forward with knuckles to earth for support. Cover her breasts and her whole body with coconut hair. Cut away her saucy chin and her lips like fruit, and plaster them above her eyes to harden into a great brow ridge.

Snip off her nose, revealing the septum. Forget there's meaning in her chatter (if there is), and hear it as sheer auditory sex stimulation, almost as heady to the male as her sexual stink."

He flashed a gleeful look at me; as though the terrier, in his enthralling investigation, had spared a moment to look round and say, "Good fun, isn't it!"

He said, "When you have had enough of her in this near-human repulsiveness, you can amuse yourself by shrinking her to a little goggle-eyed wire-fingered tarsier, scampering along branches and twigs. Then, if you like, see her (always with her expression of veiled bawdiness) as the primitive, undifferentiated mammal. Or remake her still more radically to be a monotreme. Now the young male will have to be content with a cruder and less intimate sexual contact, since he must copulate without penetration. And she will lay eggs. It is a delicate but an amusing operation to remould that marble and sculptured human arm of hers stage by stage back to the sketchy forelimb of a lizard, altering the set of the bones, the proportions of each muscle. And for those Atalanta legs of hers (which one easily pictures under the silk dress) we must achieve a still more radical feat of plastic surgery, crooking them, splaying them sideways, reducing the plump buttocks almost to extinction, and parting them to make room for a great crocodile tail. Now watch her go slithering among (or over) her fellow reptiles, while the male, chained by the nose to the bawdy smell of her, slobbers along behind."

He paused, and I sniggered politely, but anxiously. Again he shot his terrier glance at me and said, "You think I am unfair to her; but after all, that is what she really is even now, under the knickers and the brassiere, in spite of the breasts and the vagina, and the human hypertrophy of the cerebral cortex."

All I could say was, "But if you take away so much of her, where is she?" He answered, "She, of course, is what we see before us and what I have laid bare; but what I have laid bare is the controlling mechanism of the whole system even now." "But, but-" I said, and fell silent.

He resumed his fantasy. "The game can be continued indefinitely.