Thenceforward, Paul, had he so chosen, could have ruled despotically in Budge Street.  But he did not choose.  The games from which he used to be excluded, or in which he used to be allowed to join on sufferance, no longer appealed to him.  He preferred to let Joey Meakin lead the gang, vice Billy Goodge deposed, while he himself remained aloof.  Now and then he condescended to arbitrate between disputants or to kick a little brute of a, bully, but he felt that, in doing so, he was derogating from his high dignity.  It was his joy to feel himself a dark, majestic power overshadowing the street, a kind of Grand Llama hidden in mystery.  Often he would walk through the midst of the children, seemingly unconscious of their existence, acting strenuously to himself his part of a high-born prince.

This lasted till a dark and awful day when Mr. Button pitched him into the factory.  These were times before kindly Education Acts and Factory Acts decreed that no boy under twelve years of age should work in a factory, and that every boy under fourteen should spend half his time at the factory and half at school.  Paul’s education was considered complete, and he had to plunge into full time at the grim and grinding place.  He had joined the great army of workers.  A wide gulf separated him from the gang of Budge Street.  It existed for him no more than did the little girls and babies.  Life changed its aspect entirely.  Gone were the days of vagabondage, the lazy, the delicious even though cold and hungry hours of dreaming and reading in the brickfield; gone was the happy freedom of the chartered libertine of the gutter.  He was bound, a little slave, like hundreds of other little slaves and thousands of big ones, to a relentless machine.  He entered the hopeless factory gate at six in the morning and left it at half-past five in the evening; and, his rough food swallowed, slunk to his kennel in the scullery like a little tired dog.  And Mr. Button drank, and beat Mrs. Button, and Mrs. Button beat Paul whenever she felt in the humour and had anything handy to do it with, and, as a matter of course, confiscated his wages on Saturday and set him to mind the baby on Sunday afternoons.  In the monotony, weariness and greyness of life the glory of the Vision began to grow dim.

In the factory he was not thrown into competition with other boys.  He was the skip, the drudge, the carrier and fetcher, the cleaner and polisher for a work-bench of men devoid of sentiment and blind to his princely qualities.  He tried, indeed, by nimbleness of hand and intelligence, to impress them with his superiority to his predecessors, but they were not impressed.  At the most he escaped curses.  His mind began to work in the logic of the real.  Entrance into his kingdom implied as a primary condition release from the factory.  But how could such release come, when every morning a remorseless and insensate hook-just like a certain hook in the machinery whose deadly certainty of grip fascinated and terrified