er or later he felt he would be forced to do something--and
the longer he could put that off the better. But the Rev. Morrice Deans
had promised to get together three or four prominent labour leaders for
tea and a frank talk, and the opportunity was one not to be missed.
So the bishop, after a hasty and not too digestible lunch in the
refreshment room at Pringle, was now in a fly that smelt of straw
and suggested infectious hospital patients, on his way through the
industry-scarred countryside to this second conversation.

The countryside had never seemed so scarred to him as it did that day.

It was probably the bright hard spring sunshine that emphasized
the contrast between that dear England of hedges and homes and the
south-west wind in which his imagination lived, and the crude presences
of a mechanical age. Never before had the cuttings and heapings, the
smashing down of trees, the obtrusion of corrugated iron and tar, the
belchings of smoke and the haste, seemed so harsh and disregardful
of all the bishop's world. Across the fields a line of gaunt iron
standards, abominably designed, carried an electric cable to some
unknown end. The curve of the hill made them seem a little out of the
straight, as if they hurried and bent forward furtively.

"Where are they going?" asked the bishop, leaning forward to look out of
the window of the fly, and then: "Where is it all going?"

And presently the road was under repair, and was being done at a great
pace with a huge steam-roller, mechanically smashed granite, and kettles
of stinking stuff, asphalt or something of that sort, that looked
and smelt like Milton's hell. Beyond, a gaunt hoarding advertised
extensively the Princhester Music Hall, a mean beastly place that
corrupted boys and girls; and also it clamoured of tyres and potted
meats....

The afternoon's conference gave him no reassuring answer to his
question, "Where is it all going?"

The afternoon's conference did no more than intensify the new and
strange sense of alienation from the world that the morning's talk had
evoked.

The three labour extremists that Morrice Deans had assembled obviously
liked the bishop and found him picturesque, and were not above a certain
snobbish gratification at the purple-trimmed company they were in, but
it was clear that they regarded his intervention in the great dispute
as if it were a feeble waving from the bank across the waters of a great
river.

"There's an incura