? Where one single nook of shelter and escape from them! And
the English, blunt as their senses are to noise and hubbub, would be revelling
in hisses, shrieks, puffings and screeches, so that travelling would become an
intolerable affliction. »I speak rather as an invalid,« she admitted; »I conjure
up all sorts of horrors, the whistle in the night beneath one's windows, 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,«
