THE GOLDEN AGE
by the necessity of combating one hostile fate, a power antagonistic ever—a power we lived to evade—we had no confidants save ourselves. This strange anæmic order of beings was further removed from us, in fact, than the kindly beasts who shared our natural existence in the sun. The estrangement was fortified by an abiding sense of injustice, arising from the refusal of the Olympians ever to defend, to retract, to admit themselves in the wrong, or to accept similar concessions on our part. For instance, when I flung the cat out of an upper window (though I did it from no ill-feeling, and it didn't hurt the cat), I was ready, after a moment's reflection, to own I was wrong, as a gentleman should. But was the matter allowed to end there? I trow not. Again, when Harold was locked up in his room all day, for assault and battery upon a neighbour's pig—an action he would have scorned: being indeed on the friendliest terms with the porker in question—there was no handsome expression of regret on the discovery of the real culprit. What Harold had felt was not so much the imprisonment—indeed,
8
