[Legacy2linux-v2linux-cvs] Rsuit he gave it up. On these occasions there was one p

[Lowney J. <gi...@lo...>]

W he had been tracked through the streets, he put his head
to the side to think. It
was a remarkable
compliment to his abstraction that Andrew paused involuntarily
in his story and waited. He felt that his
future was in the balance. Those sons of peers may faintly realise his
position whose
parents have hesitated
whether to make statesmen or cattle-dealers of them. "I don't mind
telling you," the stranger said at last, "that your case has been
under consideration. When we left the Embankment

my intention was to dispose of you in a doorway.
But your story moves me strangely. Could

I be certain that you felt the sacredness of human life--as I fear no
boy can feel it--I

should be tempted to ask

you instead to become one of us." There was something in this remark
about the sacredness of human life that was not what Andrew expected,
and his answer died unspoken. "Youth," continued the stranger, "is
enthusiasm,
but not enthusiasm in a straight line. We are

impotent in directing it, like a boy with a
toy engine. How carefully the
child sets it off, how soon it
goes off the
rails! So youth is wrecked. The slightest obstacle sends it off at a
tangent. The vital force expended

in a wrong direction does evil
instead of good. You know the story of Atalanta.

It has always been

misread. She was the type not of woman
but of youth, and Hippomenes personated age.
He was the slower runner, but he won the race; and yet
how beautiful, even where it run to riot, must enthusiasm be in such a
cause as ours!" "If Atalanta had been Scotch," said Andrew "she would
not have lost that race for

a pound of apples." The stranger
regarded him longingly, like a father only prevented by state reasons
from embracing his son. He murmured something that Andrew hardly
caught.

It sounded like: "Atalanta would have been better dead."
"Your nationality
is in your favour," he said, "and you
have served

your apprenticeship to our calling. You have been tending towards us
ever since you came to London. You are an apple ripe for plucking, and
if you are not plucked now you will fall. I would fain take you by