I felt, quite acutely, that it was a shame
that he could not be for ever the central figure of a field of mud,
kicking a ball into long and grandiose parabolas higher than gasometers,
or breaking an occasional leg, surrounded by the violent affection of
hearts whose melting-point was the exclamation, "Good old Jos!" I felt
that if he must repose his existence ought to have been so contrived
that he could repose in impassive and senseless dignity, like a mountain
watching the flight of time. The conception of him tracing symbols in a
ledger, counting shillings and sixpences, descending to arithmetic, and
suffering those humiliations which are the invariable preliminaries to
legitimate fatherhood, was shocking to a nice taste for harmonious
fitness.... What, this precious and terrific organism, this slave with a
specialty--whom distant towns had once been anxious to buy at the
prodigious figure of five hundred pounds--obliged to sit in a mean
chamber and wait silently while the woman of his choice encountered the
supreme peril! And he would "soon be past football!" He was "thirty-four
if a day!" It was the verge of senility! He was no longer worth five
hundred pounds.
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