his small brown hands were whittling a block of wood into a figure, whether it was not a sound instinct on the part of the race to persecute illegitimate children.  Either they were conceived more lethargically than other children, of women who yielded through feeble-wittedness or need of money to men who did not love them enough to marry them, and so were born below the average of the race, dullards that made life ugly, or parasites that had to be kept on honest people’s money in prisons or workhouses.  Or, like, Richard, they had been conceived more intensely than other children, of love so passionate that it had drawn together men and women separated by social prohibitions.  So they were born to rule like kings over the lawfully begotten, so that married folk raged to see that, because they had known no more than ordinary pleasure, their seed was to be penalised by servitude.  Richard would always be adored by all but the elderly and the impotent.

Because vitality itself had been kneaded into his flesh by his parents’ passion he would not die until he was an old, old man and needed rest after interminable victories; and because it played through his mind like lightning, he would always have power over men and material, and even over himself.  Since he had been begotten when beauty, like a strong goddess, pressed together the bodies of his father and mother, she would disclose more of her works to him than to other sons of men with whose begetting she was not concerned.  Even now, every time Marion let him take her to the turn of the road past Roothing, where he could show her the oak cut like a club on a playing-card and aflame with autumn that stood on the hill’s edge, against the far grey desolation of Kerith Island and the sunless tides, he knew such joy as one would have thought beyond a child’s achievement.  He would get as much out of life as any man that ever lived.  At the thought of the contrast between this heir to everything and the other child, that poor waif who all his life long would be sent round to the back door, tears rushed to her eyes, and she cried indignantly, “Oh, I do think you might be nice to Roger.”  Richard looked at her sharply.  “What, do you really mind about it, mummie?” The surprise in his tone told her the worst about her forced and mechanical kindnesses to Roger.  “Oh, more than anything,” she almost sobbed.  “Very well, I’ll be nice to him,” he answered shortly, adding after a minute, with a deliberate impishness, as if he hated the moment and wanted to burlesque it, “After all, mums, I never do hit him....”  But for the rest of the evening the golden glow of his face was clouded with solemnity, and when she was tucking him up that night he said, in an off-hand way, “You know prob’ly Roger’s got much older while he’s been away, and I’ll be able to play with him more when he comes back.”  She laughed happily.  If he was going to help her to frustrate her unnatural hatred of Roger, she would succeed.