inns, to peer into the brown gloom where pewter pots and rows of china
jugs shone, and from which, over newly washed floors of red tiles,
landlords advanced with foaming mugs.

Mrs. Marston strongly disapproved of these proceedings, but did not
think it polite to expostulate, as she was receiving a favour.

In Silverton Mrs. Marston lingered a long while before any shop where
sacred pictures were displayed. The ones she looked at longest were
those of that peculiarly seedy and emasculated type which modern
religion seems to produce. Hazel, all in a fidget to go and buy her
clothes, looked at them, and wondered what they had to do with her.
There was one of an untidy woman sitting in a garden of lilies--evidently
forced--talking to an anaemic-looking man with uncut hair and a
phosphorescent head. Hazel did not know about phosphorus or haloes,
but she remembered how she had gone into the kitchen one night in the
dark and screamed at sight of a sheep's head on the table, shining with
a strange greenish light. This picture reminded her of it. She hastily
looked at the others. She liked the one with sheep in it best, only the
artist had made them like bolsters, and given the shepherd saucer eyes.
Then she came to one of the Crucifixion, a subject on which the artist
had lavished all the slumbering instincts of torture that are in so
many people.

'Oh! what a drodsome un! I dunna like this shop,' said Hazel tearfully.
'What'm they doing to 'im? Oh, they'm great beasts!'

Perhaps she had seen in her dim and childish way the everlasting
tyranny of the material over the abstract; of bluster over nerves;
strength over beauty; States over individuals; churches over souls; and