heart failed him. And there was no one to whom he could tell the
tragic and romantic story of his birth. One or two happy gleams of
brightness, however, lightened his darkness and prevented the Vision
from fading entirely into the greyness of the factory sky. Once the
Owner, an unspeakable god with a bald pink head and a paunch vastly
chained with gold, conducted a party of ladies over the works. One
of the latter, a very grand lady, noticed him at his bench and
came-and spoke kindly to him. Her voice had the same sweet timbre as
his goddess's. After she had left him his quick ears caught her
question to the Owner: "Where did you get your young Apollo? Not out
of Lancashire, surely? He's wonderful." And just before she passed
out of sight she turned and looked at him and smiled. He learned on
inquiry that she was the Marchioness of Chudley. The instant
recognition of him by one of his own aristocratic caste revived his
faith. The day would assuredly come. Suppose it had been his own
mother, instead of the Marchioness? Stranger things happened in the
books. The other gleam proceeded from one of the workmen at his
bench, a serious and socialistic person who occasionally lent him
something to read: Foxe's "Book of Martyrs," "Mill on Liberty,"
Bellamy's "Looking Backward," at that time at the height of its
popularity. And sometimes he would talk to Paul about collectivism
and the new era that was coming when there would be no such words as
rich and poor, because there would be no such classes as they
denoted.

Paul would say: "Then a prince will be no better than a factory
hand?"

"There won't be any princes, I tell thee," his friend would reply,
and launch out into a denunciation of tyrants.