... He was fine, he
was free, he was absolutely master. His legs might shake, his body lurch
from side to side, his breath come in agitating gasps and whistles; the
wall was now far behind him, the screen most wonderfully near, the
rocking-chair almost within his grasp. Great and mighty is Ernest Henry
Wilberforce, dazzling and again dazzling the lighted avenues opening now
before him; there is nothing, nothing, from the rendings of the toys to
the deliberate defiance of his nurse and all those in authority over
him, that he shall not now perform.... With a cry, with a wild wave of
the arms, with a sickening foretaste of the bump with which the gay
brown carpet would mark him, he was down, the Fates were upon him--the
disturbance, the disrobing, the darkness. Nevertheless, even as he was
carried, sobbing, into the farther room, there went with him a
consciousness that life would never again be quite the dull,
purposeless, monotonous thing that it had hitherto been.
II
After a long time he was alone. About him the room, save for the yellow
night-light above his head, was dark, humped with shadows, with grey
pools of light near the windows, and a golden bar that some lamp beyond
the house flung upon the wall.
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