“It isn’t that I expect these things are what Harry had in mind,” Collins would say, for always he was training his assistants; “but that through them I may get a cue to his specially, whatever in God’s name it is, that poor Harry must have known.”

Out of love, at the wish of his love-god, Steward, Michael would have striven to learn these tricks and in most of them would have succeeded.  But here at Cedarwild was no love, and his own thoroughbred nature made him stubbornly refuse to do under compulsion what he would gladly have done out of love.  As a result, since Collins was no thoroughbred of a man, the clashes between them were for a time frequent and savage.  In this fighting Michael quickly learned he had no chance.  He was always doomed to defeat.  He was beaten by stereotyped formula before he began.  Never once could he get his teeth into Collins or Johnny.  He was too common-sensed to keep up the battling in which he would surely have broken his heart and his body and gone dumb mad.  Instead, he retired into himself, became sullen, undemonstrative, and, though he never cowered in defeat, and though he was always ready to snarl and bristle his hair in advertisement that inside he was himself and unconquered, he no longer burst out in furious anger.

After a time, scarcely ever trying him out on a new trick, the chain and Johnny were dispensed with, and with Collins he spent all Collins’s hours in the arena.  He learned, by bitter lessons, that he must follow Collins around; and follow him he did, hating him perpetually and in his own body slowly and subtly poisoning himself by the juices of his glands that did not secrete and flow in quite their normal way because of the pressure put upon them by his hatred.

The effect of this, on his body, was not perceptible.  This was because of his splendid constitution and health.  Wherefore, since the effect must be produced somewhere, it was his mind, or spirit, or nature, or brain, or processes of consciousness, that received it.  He drew more and more within himself, became morose, and brooded much.  All of which was spiritually unhealthful.  He, who had been so merry-hearted, even merrier-hearted than his brother Jerry, began to grow saturnine, and peevish, and ill-tempered.  He no longer experienced impulses to play, to romp around, to run about.  His body became as quiet and controlled as his brain.  Human convicts, in prisons, attain this quietude.  He could stand by the hour, to heel to Collins, uninterested, infinitely bored, while Collins tortured some mongrel creature into the performance of a trick.