The Diurnal Heroism of Manual Labour

Today’s quoted passage from THE GLASTONBURY ROMANCE (1933) by John Cowper Powys. This represents the first appearance of Geard: with a head like mine! But can one ‘own’ one’s head that is joined to the body. Don’t you only own things that need not be yours to own until you do own them?

“Here there was a suspended gas-globe, and here the strangers turned, revealing the black bowler hat and hooked Roman nose of Mr. Owen Evans, and a broad-shouldered, rather fleshy individual, without any hat, whose grizzled head under that suspended light seemed to Sam the largest human head he had ever seen. It was the head of a hydrocephalic dwarf; but in other respects its owner was not dwarfish. In other respects its owner had the normally plump, rather unpleasantly plump figure of any well-to-do-man, whose back has never been bent nor his muscles hardened by the diurnal heroism of manual labour.”