“You thought it was for the sake of the architecture....”

“Then why do you not come home and spend Christmas with your mother!”

“Christmas!  Well, I suppose I ought to.  But it will be hard to bear with the plain Protestantism, the smug materialism of Sussex at such a season; and when one thinks what the day is commemorative of—­”

“You surely do not mean that you would prefer to see the people starving?  If your dislike of Protestantism rests only on roast beef and plum pudding....”

“No, you don’t understand.  But I beg your pardon—­I had really forgotten....”

“Never mind,” said Mr Hare smiling; “continue:  we were talking of roast beef and plum pudding—­”

“Well, roast beef and plum pudding, say what you like, is a very complete figuration of the Protestant ideal.  Now let us think of Sussex....  The villas with their gables, and railings, and laurels, the snug farm-houses, the market-gardening, but especially the villas, so representative of a sleepy smug materialism....  Oh, it is horrible; I cannot think of Sussex without a revulsion of feeling.  Sussex is utterly opposed to the monastic spirit.  Why, even the downs are easy, yes, easy as one of the upholsterer’s armchairs of the villa residences.  And the aspect of the county tallies exactly with the state of soul of its people.  In that southern county all is soft and lascivious; there is no wildness, none of that scenical grandeur which we find in Scotland and Ireland, and which is emblematic of the yearning of man’s soul for something higher than this mean and temporal life.”

There was rapture in John’s eyes.  With a quick movement of his hands he seemed to spurn the entire materialism of Sussex.  After a pause, he continued: 

“There is no asceticism in Sussex, there is no yearning for anything higher or better.  You—­yes, you and the whole place are, in every sense of the word, Conservative—­that is to say, brutally satisfied with the present ordering of things.”

“Now, now, my dear John, by your own account Pearson is not by any means so satisfied with the present condition of things as you yourself would wish him to be.”

John laughed loudly, and it was clear that the paradox in no way displeased him.

“But we were speaking,” he continued, “not of temporal, but of spiritual pains and penalties.  Now, anyone who did not know me—­and none will ever know me—­would think that I had not a care in the world.  Well, I have suffered as horribly, I have been tortured as cruelly, as ever poor mortal was....  I have lain on the floor of my room, my heart dead within me, and moaned and shrieked with horror.”

“Horror of what?”