Now the moment was shattered, and the power to rebuild it failed
him. He had never before thought about putting together broken
bits: he felt like a man whose house has been wrecked by an
earthquake, and who, for lack of skilled labour, is called upon
for the first time to wield a trowel and carry bricks. He
simply did not know how.

Will-power, he saw, was not a thing one could suddenly decree
oneself to possess. It must be built up imperceptibly and
laboriously out of a succession of small efforts to meet
definite objects, out of the facing of daily difficulties
instead of cleverly eluding them, or shifting their burden on
others. The making of the substance called character was a
process about as slow and arduous as the building of the
Pyramids; and the thing itself, like those awful edifices, was
mainly useful to lodge one's descendants in, after they too were
dust. Yet the Pyramid-instinct was the one which had made the
world, made man, and caused his fugitive joys to linger like
fading frescoes on imperishable walls ....



XXI

ON the drive back from her dinner at the Nouveau Luxe, events
had followed the course foreseen by Susy.

She had promised Strefford to seek legal advice about her
divorce, and he had kissed her; and the promise had been easier