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. She saw at once that he did not trust the little creature to know whether it required to eat the biscuit; it was her proper time for eating it, and even though by holding her nose close he could not make her eat it, he could put her in the corner for not eating it. And having in due course seen him do so, Nature had felt ever since that he would keep himself apart, year by year and step by step, till he was safely serving in the cold, still corridors of Power. She watched him, then, with interest, throughout his school and university career, considering what division of the State she had best build with him, though whether he should work at feeding soldiers, at supervising education, or organizing the incarceration of his fellows, did not seem to her to matter much. In all these things order was essential, and the love of placing the hand kindly but firmly on the public head, desirable; further, these were all things that must be done, and with her unerring instinct for economy, Nature saw that he should do them. He had accordingly entered the State’s service at a proper age, and had remained there, rising.