From this conversation the bishop had made his way to the vicarage of Mogham Banks.  The vicar of Mogham Banks was a sacerdotal socialist of the most advanced type, with the reputation of being closely in touch with the labour extremists.  He was a man addicted to banners, prohibited ornaments, special services at unusual hours, and processions in the streets.  His taste in chasubles was loud, he gardened in a cassock and, it was said, he slept in his biretta; he certainly slept in a hair shirt, and he littered his church with flowers, candles, side altars, confessional boxes, requests for prayers for the departed, and the like.  There had already been two Kensitite demonstrations at his services, and altogether he was a source of considerable anxiety to the bishop.  The bishop did his best not to know too exactly what was going on at Mogham Banks.  Sooner 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.