human nature. It was a day under an east wind, when a steely-blue sky
full of colourless light filled a stiff-necked world with whitish high
lights and inky shadows. These bright harsh days of barometric high
pressure in England rouse and thwart every expectation of the happiness
of spring. And as the bishop drove through the afternoon in a hired
fly along a rutted road of slag between fields that were bitterly wired
against the Sunday trespasser, he fell into a despondent meditation upon
the political and social outlook.

His thoughts were of a sort not uncommon in those days. The world was
strangely restless. Since the passing of Victoria the Great there had
been an accumulating uneasiness in the national life. It was as if some
compact and dignified paper-weight had been lifted from people's ideas,
and as if at once they had begun to blow about anyhow. Not that Queen
Victoria had really been a paper-weight or any weight at all, but
it happened that she died as an epoch closed, an epoch of tremendous
stabilities. Her son, already elderly, had followed as the selvedge
follows the piece, he had passed and left the new age stripped bare.
In nearly every department of economic and social life now there was
upheaval, and it was an upheaval very different in character from the
radicalism and liberalism of the Victorian days. There were not only
doubt and denial, but now there were also impatience and unreason.
People argued less and acted quicker. There was a pride in rebellion for
its own sake, an indiscipline and disposition to sporadic violence that
made it extremely hard to negotiate any reconciliations or compromises.
Behind every extremist it seemed stood a further extremist prepared to
go one better....

The bishop had spent most of the morning with one of the big employers,
a tall dark man, lean and nervous, and obviously tired and worried