A Commentary by John Galsworthy — Read

When he rose every morning, the first thing he would do was to fall on his knees beside his bed. His figure in its white garment -- for he wore a nightshirt -- was rather long and lean, and looked its longest thus bent from the loins. His thick fair hair, little disturbed by sleep, together with a glimpse of sanguine neck and cheek, was all that could be seen above that figure, for his face was buried in the counterpane. Here he would commune with the deity he had constructed for himself out of his secret aspirations and desires, out of his most private consciousness. In the long and subtle processes of contemplation this deity had come to be a big white-clothed figure, whose face and head were shrouded from his gaze in frosty dimness, but whose hands -- great hands, a little red -- were always clearly visible, reposing motionless on knees parted beneath the white and flowing garment. The figure appeared in his imagination seated as it were on air ten or fifteen feet above the floor of a white, wide, marble corridor, and its great hands seemed to be pressing down and stilling all that came before them. So oddly concrete was this image that sometimes he addressed no prayers to it, but knelt, simply feeling that it was sitting there above him; and when at last he raised his head, a strange aspiring look had come into his strained eyes, and face suffused with blood. When he did pray, he himself hardly knew for what he prayed, unless it were to be made like his deity, that sat so quiet, above the marble corridor.

For, after all, this deity of his, like the deity of every other man, was but his temperament exaggerated beyond life-size and put in perfect order -- it was but the concretion of his constant feeling that nothing could be trusted to behave, freed from the still, cold hands of Power. He had never trusted himself to act save under the authority of this peculiar deity, much less, then, could he feel that others could be trusted. This lack of trust -- which was only, perhaps, a natural desire for putting everything and everybody in their proper places -- had made him from a child eligible for almost any post of trust. And Nature, recognising this, had used him a hundred thousand times, weeding him out from among his more irregular and trustful fellows, and piling him in layers, one on another, till she had built out of him in every division of the State, temples of Power. Two qualifications alone had she exacted; that he should not be trustful, and that he should be content to lie beneath the layer above him, until he should come in time to be that upper layer himself. She had marked him down as quite a tiny boy, walking with his governess, chopping the heads off thistles with his stick, and ordering his brothers' games precisely, so that they should all know what they were playing at. She had seen him take his dog, and, squatting on the floor, hold it close to the biscuit that it did not want to eat; and she had marked the expression in his grey eyes, fixed on that little white fox-terrier, trying so hard to back out through her collar.