Oliver watched his wife go down the path, reassured.  He had been a little troubled once or twice lately by an odd word or two that his mother had let fall.  She had been brought up a Christian for a few years, and it seemed to him sometimes as if it had left a taint.  There was an old “Garden of the Soul” that she liked to keep by her, though she always protested with an appearance of scorn that it was nothing but nonsense.  Still, Oliver would have preferred that she had burned it:  superstition was a desperate thing for retaining life, and, as the brain weakened, might conceivably reassert itself.  Christianity was both wild and dull, he told himself, wild because of its obvious grotesqueness and impossibility, and dull because it was so utterly apart from the exhilarating stream of human life; it crept dustily about still, he knew, in little dark churches here and there; it screamed with hysterical sentimentality in Westminster Cathedral which he had once entered and looked upon with a kind of disgusted fury; it gabbled strange, false words to the incompetent and the old and the half-witted.  But it would be too dreadful if his own mother ever looked upon it again with favour.

Oliver himself, ever since he could remember, had been violently opposed to the concessions to Rome and Ireland.  It was intolerable that these two places should be definitely yielded up to this foolish, treacherous nonsense:  they were hot-beds of sedition; plague-spots on the face of humanity.  He had never agreed with those who said that it was better that all the poison of the West should be gathered rather than dispersed.  But, at any rate, there it was.  Rome had been given up wholly to that old man in white in exchange for all the parish churches and cathedrals of Italy, and it was understood that mediaeval darkness reigned there supreme; and Ireland, after receiving Home Rule thirty years before, had declared for Catholicism, and opened her arms to Individualism in its most virulent form.  England had laughed and assented, for she was saved from a quantity of agitation by the immediate departure of half her Catholic population for that island, and had, consistently with her Communist-colonial policy, granted every facility for Individualism to reduce itself there ad absurdum.  All kinds of funny things were happening there:  Oliver had read with a bitter amusement of new appearances there, of a Woman in Blue and shrines raised where her feet had rested; but he was scarcely amused at Rome, for the movement to Turin of the Italian Government had deprived the Republic of quite a quantity of sentimental prestige, and had haloed the old religious nonsense with all the meretriciousness of historical association.  However, it obviously could not last much longer:  the world was beginning to understand at last.