"And thrice a fool,"
he added, "to assort her gifts so ill."
"Fate is a knave, a mad thing playing at cat's cradle with the threads of
our wretched little lives," answered John Barron, "she is a coward--a
bully. She hits the hungry below the belt; she heaps gold into the lap of
the old man, but not till he has already dug his own grave to come at it;
she gives health to those who must needs waste all their splendid strength
on work; and wealth to worthless beings like myself who are always ailing
and who never spend a pound with wisdom. Make no dark cryptic mystery of
Fate when you paint her. She looks to me like a mischievous monkey poking
sticks into an ant-hill."
"She's a woman," said Murdoch.
"She's three," corrected Brady; "what can you expect from three women
rolled into one?"
"Away with her! Waste no incense at her shrine. She'll cut the thread no
sooner because you turn your back on her." Fling overboard your
mythologies, dead and alive, and kneel to Nature. A budding spike of wild
hyacinth is worth all the gods put together. Go hand in hand with Nature, I
say. Ask nothing from her; walk humbly; be well content if she lets you but
turn the corner of one page none else have read. That's how I live. My life
is not a prayer exactly--"
"I should say not," interrupted Brady.
"But a hymn of praise--a purely impersonal existence, lived all alone, like
a man at a prison window.
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