Thenceforward, Paul, had he so chosen, could have ruled despotically in
Budge Street. But he did not choose. The games from which he used to be
excluded, or in which he used to be allowed to join on sufferance, no
longer appealed to him. He preferred to let Joey Meakin lead the gang,
vice Billy Goodge deposed, while he himself remained aloof. Now and
then he condescended to arbitrate between disputants or to kick a
little brute of a bully, but he felt that, in doing so, he was
derogating from his high dignity. It was his joy to feel himself a
dark, majestic power overshadowing the street, a kind of Grand Llama
hidden in mystery. Often he would walk through the midst of the
children, seemingly unconscious of their existence, acting strenuously
to himself his part of a high-born prince.

This lasted till a dark and awful day when Mr. Button pitched him into
the factory. These were times before kindly Education Acts and Factory
Acts decreed that no boy under twelve years of age should work in a
factory, and that every boy under fourteen should spend half his time
at the factory and half at school. Paul's education was considered
complete, and he had to plunge into full time at the grim and grinding
place. He had joined the great army of workers. A wide gulf separated
him from the gang of Budge Street. It existed for him no more than did
the little girls and babies. Life changed its aspect entirely. Gone
were the days of vagabondage, the lazy, the delicious even though cold
and hungry hours of dreaming and reading in the brickfield; gone was
the happy freedom of the chartered libertine of the gutter. He was
bound, a little slave, like hundreds of other little slaves and
thousands of big ones, to a relentless machine. He entered the hopeless
factory gate at six in the morning and left it at half-past five in the
evening; and, his rough food swallowed, slunk to his kennel in the
scullery like a little tired dog. And Mr. Button drank, and beat Mrs.
Button, and Mrs. Button beat Paul whenever she felt in the humour and
had anything handy to do it with, and, as a matter of course,
confiscated his wages on Saturday and set him to mind the baby on
Sunday afternoons. In the monotony, weariness and greyness of life the
glory of the Vision began to grow dim.

In the factory he was not thrown into competition with other boys. He
was the skip, the drudge, the carrier and fetcher, the cleaner and
polisher for a work-bench of men dev