THE GOLDEN AGE
thing's the same to them, rough or smooth, and sooner or later they slip off and disappear; and you never see them again. Gone back, I suppose.'
'Of course,' said I. 'Don't see what they ever came away for; I wouldn't. To be told you've broken things when you haven't, and stopped having tea with the servants in the kitchen, and not allowed to have a dog to sleep with you. But I've known people, too, who've gone there.'
The artist stared, but without incivility.
'Well, there's Lancelot,' I went on. 'The book says he died, but it never seemed to read right, somehow. He just went away, like Arthur. And Crusoe, when he got tired of wearing clothes and being respectable. And all the nice men in the stories who don't marry the Princess, 'cos only one man ever gets married in a book, you know. They'll be there!'
'And the men who never come off,' he said, 'who try like the rest, but get knocked out, or somehow miss—or break down or get bowled over in the mêlée—and get no Princess, nor
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