Fashion brought you forth, and she has seen to it that you are the image of your mother, knowing that if she made you by a hair’s-breadth different, you would see what she is like and judge her. You are Fashion, Fashion herself, blind, fear-full Fashion! You do what you do because others do it; think what you think because others think it; feel what you feel because others feel it. You are the Figure without eyes. And no one can reach you, no one can alter you, poor little bundle of others’ thoughts; for there is nothing left to reach. In your seven hundred carriages, you pass; and the road is bright with you. Above that road, below it, and on either hand, are the million things and beings that you cannot see; all that is organic in the world, all that is living and creating, all that is striving to be free. You pass, glittering, on your round, the sightless captive of your own triumph; and the eyes of the hollow-chested work-girls on the pavement fix on you a thousand eager looks, for you are strange to them. Many of their hearts are sore with envy; they do not know that you are as dead as snow around a crater; they cannot tell you for the nothing that you are--Fashion! The Figure without eyes! SPORT VII SPORT Often in the ride of some Scotch wood I used to stand, clutching my gun, with eyes moving from right to left, from left to right. Every nerve and fibre of my body would receive and answer to the slightest movements, the smallest noises, the faintest scents. The acrid sweetness of the spruce-trees in the mist, the bite of innumerable midges, the feel of the deep, wet, mossy heather underfoot, the brown-grey twilight of the wood, the stillness--these were poignant as they never will be again. And slowly, back of that stillness, the noises of the beaters would begin. Gentle and regular, at first--like the ending of a symphony rather than its birth--they would swell, then drop and fade away completely. In that unexpected silence a squirrel scurried out along a branch, sat a moment looking, and scurried back; or, with its soft, blunt flight, an owl would fly across.