and the smoke of trains defacing the
landscape; hideous accidents too. They will be wholesale and past
help. Imagine a collision! I have borne many changes with equanimity, I
pretend to a certain degree of philosophy, but this mania for cutting up
the land does really cause me to pity those who are to follow us. They
will not see the England we have seen. It will be patched and scored,
disfigured... a sort of barbarous Maori visage--England in a New Zealand
mask. You may call it the sentimental view. In this case, I am decidedly
sentimental: I love my country. I do love quiet, rural England. Well,
and I love beauty, I love simplicity. All that will be destroyed by the
refuse of the towns flooding the land--barring accidents, as Lukin says.
There seems nothing else to save us.'

Redworth acquiesced. 'Nothing.'

'And you do not regret it?' he was asked.

'Not a bit. We have already exchanged opinions on the subject.
Simplicity must go, and the townsman meet his equal in the countryman.
As for beauty, I would sacrifice that to circulate gumption. A bushelful
of nonsense is talked pro and con: it always is at an innovation. What
we are now doing, is to take a longer and a quicker stride, that is
all.'

'And establishing a new field for the speculator.'

'Yes, and I am one, and this is the matter I wanted to discuss with you,
Lady Dunstane,' said Redworth, bending forward, the whole man devoted to
the point of business.

She declared she was complimented; she felt the compliment, and trusted
her advice might be useful, faintly remarking that she had a woman's
head: and 'not less' was implied as much as 'not more,' in order to give
strength to her prospective opposition.

All his money, she heard, was down on the railway table. He might within
a year have a tolerable fortune: and, of course, he might be ruined. He
did not expect it; still he fronted the risks. 'And now,' said he, 'I
come to you for counsel. I am not held among my acquaintances to be a
marrying man, as it's called.'

He paused. Lady Dunstane thought it an occasion to praise him for his
considerateness.

'You involve no one but yourself, you mean?' Her eyes shed approval.
'Still the day may come... I say only that it may: and the wish to marry
is a rosy colouring... equal to a flying chariot in conducting us across
difficulties and obstructions to the deed. And then one may have to
regret a previous rashness.'

These practical men are sometimes ob