his armour and flashed
his sword towards the envying stars.

"It is I, my love!" he cried. "I am here."

And there, before the dawn had made the shadows of the Law Courts
grey, they found him; bruised and muddy and daubed with blood,
without the sword and spurs of his honour, lacking the scented token
of his love. A thing in no way tragic, for here was no misfortune,
but merely the conclusion of Nature's remorseless logic. For century
after century those of his name had lived, sheltered by the prowess
of their ancestors from the trivial hardships and afflictions that
make us men. And now he lay on the pavement, stiff and cold, a babe
that had cried itself to sleep because it could not understand,
silent until the morning.

Fate And The Artist

The workmen's dwellings stood in the northwest of London, in
quaint rivalry with the comfortable ugliness of the Maida Vale blocks
of flats. They were fairly new and very well built, with wide stone
staircases that echoed all day to the impatient footsteps of children,
and with a flat roof that served at once as a playground for them and
a drying-ground for their mothers' washing. In hot weather it was
pleasant enough to play hide-and-seek or follow-my-leader up and down
the long alleys of cool white linen, and if a sudden gust of wind or
some unexpected turn of the game set the wet sheets flapping in the
children's faces, their senses were rather tickled than annoyed.

To George, mooning in a corner of the railings that seemed to keep all
London in a cage, these games were hardly more important than the
shoutings and whistlings that rose from the street below. It seemed to
him that all his life--he had lived eleven years--he had been standing
in a corner watching other people engaging in meaningless ploys and
antics. The sun was hot, and yet the children ran about and made
themselves hotter, and he wondered, as when he had been in bed with
one of his frequent illnesses he had wondered at the grown-up folk who
came and went, moving their arms and legs and speaking with their
mouths, when it was possible to lie still and quiet and feel the
moments ticking themselves off in one's forehead. As he rested in his
corner, he was conscious of the sharp edge of the narrow stone ledge
on which he was sitting and the thin iron railings that pressed into
his back; he smelt the evil smell of hot London, and the soapy odour
of the washing; he saw the glitter of the dust, and the noi