She stood for a moment looking up at the stars, so far, so many, bright and cold. And with a faint smile she thought: ‘I wonder which is my lucky sta… - John Galsworthy

An epoch which had gilded individual liberty so that if a man had money he was free in law and fact, and if he had not money he was free in law and not in fact. An era which had canonized hypocrisy, so that to seem to be respectable was to be.

Men are in fact, quite unable to control their own inventions; they at best develop adaptability to the new conditions those inventions create.

But in those four minutes the boy before you has slipped through a door, hardly opened, into that great cage which never again quite lets a man go — the cage of the Law.