For ten months he had never spent a day without making experiments on this shifting universe in which he alone remained firm and stationary.  The experiments were chiefly conducted out of idle amusement, but he was serious on the subject of food.  Lately the behaviour of the universe in regard to his food had somewhat perplexed him, had indeed annoyed him.  However, he was of a forgetful, happy disposition, and so long as the universe continued to fulfil its sole end as a machinery for the satisfaction, somehow, of his imperious desires, he was not inclined to remonstrate.  He gazed at the flames and laughed, and laughed because he had laughed.  He pushed the ball away and wriggled after it, and captured it with the assurance of practice.  He tried to swallow the doll, and it was not until he had tried several times to swallow it that he remembered the failure of previous efforts and philosophically desisted.  He rolled with a fearful shock, arms and legs in air, against the mountainous flank of that mammoth Fan, and clutched at Fan’s ear.  The whole mass of Fan upheaved and vanished from his view, and was instantly forgotten by him.  He seized the doll and tried to swallow it, and repeated the exhibition of his skill with the ball.  Then he saw the fire again and laughed.  And so he existed for centuries:  no responsibilities, no appetites; and the shawl was vast.  Terrific operations went on over his head.  Giants moved to and fro.  Great vessels were carried off and great books were brought and deep voices rumbled regularly in the spaces beyond the shawl.  But he remained oblivious.  At last he became aware that a face was looking down at his.  He recognized it, and immediately an uncomfortable sensation in his stomach disturbed him; he tolerated it for fifty years or so, and then he gave a little cry.  Life had resumed its seriousness.

“Black alpaca.  B quality.  Width 20, t.a. 22 yards,” Miss Insull read out of a great book.  She and Mr. Povey were checking stock.

And Mr. Povey responded, “Black alpaca B quality.  Width 20, t.a. 22 yards.  It wants ten minutes yet.”  He had glanced at the clock.

“Does it?” said Constance, well knowing that it wanted ten minutes.

The baby did not guess that a high invisible god named Samuel Povey, whom nothing escaped, and who could do everything at once, was controlling his universe from an inconceivable distance.  On the contrary, the baby was crying to himself, There is no God.

His weaning had reached the stage at which a baby really does not know what will happen next.  The annoyance had begun exactly three months after his first tooth, such being the rule of the gods, and it had grown more and more disconcerting.  No sooner did he accustom himself to a new phenomenon than it mysteriously ceased, and an old one took its place which he had utterly forgotten.  This afternoon his mother nursed him, but not until she had foolishly attempted to divert him from the seriousness of life