country, he had yet attempted, but attempt it he would.... He was as
obstinate as his chin could make him.

With his blue eyes still cautiously upon his nurse's shadow he raised
himself very softly, his fat hand pressed against the wall, his mouth
tightly closed, and from between his teeth there issued the most distant
relation of that sound that the traditional ostler makes when he is
cleaning down a horse. His knees quivered, straightened; he was up. Far
away in the long, long distance were piled the toys that yesterday's
birthday had given him. They did not, as yet, mean anything to him at
all. One day, perhaps when he had torn the dolls limb from limb, twisted
the railways until they stood end upon end in sheer horror,
disembowelled the bears and golliwogs so that they screamed again, he
might have some personal feeling for them. At present there they lay in
shining impersonal newness, and there for Ernest Henry they might lie
for ever.

For an instant, his hand against the wall, he was straight and
motionless; then he took his hand away, and his journey began. At the
first movement a strange, an amazing glory filled him. From the instant,
two years ago, of his first arrival he had been disturbed by an
irritating sense of inadequacy; he had been sent, it seemed, into this
new and tiresome condition of things without any fitting provisions for
his real needs. Demands were always made upon him that were, in the
absurd lack of ways and means, impossible of fulfilment. But now, at
last, he was using the world as it should be used.... He was fine, he
was free, he was absolutely master. His legs might shake, his body lurch
from side to side, his breath come in agitating gasps and whistles; the
wall was now far behind him, the screen most wonderfully near, the
rocking-chair almost within his grasp. Great and mighty is Ernest Henry