have had a thrust perhaps at the Viceroy's Cup, and done fantastic
horsefleshy things around the Gulf of Aden. And then a golden
stream has dried up, the sunlight has faded suddenly out of things,
and the gods have nodded "Go." And they have not gone. They have
turned instead to the muddy lanes and cheap villas and the marked-
down ills of life, to watch pear trees growing and to encourage hens
for their eggs. And Judkin was even as these others; the wine had
been suddenly spilt from his cup of life, and he had stayed to suck
at the dregs which the wise throw away. In the days of his scorn
for most things he would have stared the roan mare and her turn-out
out of all pretension to smartness, as he would have frozen a cheap
claret behind its cork, or a plain woman behind her veil; and now he
was walking stoically through the mud, in a tweed suit that would
eventually go on to the gardener's boy, and would perhaps fit him.
The dear gods, who know the end before the beginning, were perhaps
growing a gardener's boy somewhere to fit the garments, and Judkin
was only a caretaker, inhabiting a portion of them. That is what I
like to think, and I am probably wrong. And Judkin, whose clothes
had been to him once more than a religion, scarcely less sacred than
a family quarrel, would carry those parcels back to his villa and to
the wife who awaited him and them--a wife who may, for all we know
to the contrary, have had a figure once, and perhaps has yet a heart
of gold--of nine-carat gold, let us say at the least--but assuredly
a soul of tape. And he that has fetched and carried will explain
how it has fared with him in his dealings, and if he has brought the
wrong sort of sugar or thread he will wheedle away the displeasure
from that leaden face as a pastrycook girl will drive bluebottles
off a stale bun. And that man has known what it was to coax the
fret of a thoroughbred, to soothe its toss and sweat as it danced
beneath him in the glee and chafe of its pulses and the glory of its