But, when first I saw the poor fa‡ade being pick-axed, I did not
`give' it more than a fortnight. I had no feeling but of hopeless awe
and pity. The workmen on the coping seemed to me ministers of
inexorable Olympus, executing an Olympian decree. And the building
seemed to me a live victim, a scapegoat suffering sullenly for sins it
had not committed. To me it seemed to be flinching under every
rhythmic blow of those well-wielded weapons, praying for the hour when
sunset should bring it surcease from that daily ordeal. I caught
myself nodding to it--a nod of sympathy, of hortation to endurance.
Immediately, I was ashamed of my lapse into anthropomorphism. I told
myself that my pity ought to be kept for the real men who had been
frequenters of the building, who now were waifs. I reviewed the
gaping, glassless windows through which they had been wont to watch
the human comedy. There they had stood, puffing their smoke and
cracking their jests, and tearing women's reputations to shreds.
Not that I, personally, have ever heard a woman's reputation torn to
shreds in a club window. A constant reader of lady-novelists, I have
always been hoping for this excitement, but somehow it has never come
my way. I am beginning to suspect that it never will, and am inclined
to regard it as a figment.
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