Redworth nodded assent. It might be surmised that he was brooding over
those railways, in which he had embarked his fortune. Ah! those
railways! She was not long coming to the wailful exclamation upon them,
both to express her personal sorrow at the disfigurement of our dear
England, and lead to a little, modest, offering of a woman's counsel to
the rash adventurer; for thus could she serviceably put aside her
perplexity awhile. Those railways! When would there be peace in the
land? 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.