“Nature appears to have only one idea in her head,” she continued after a pause, “so far as we men and women are concerned. She’s been kinder to the lower animals.” She finished with one of Burns’s lyrics; and then told Arthur that it was now his turn, and that she would play for him. He shook his head, pleading that he was out of practice.!

“It’s war,” he said. “God is knocking at your heart, but you will not open to Him. You have filled your hearts with love of self. There is no room for Him to enter in.”

“What’s Carleton got to do with it?” demanded Joan with a note of indignation. She saw the London of the future. Not the vision popular just then: a soaring whirl of machinery in motion, of moving pavements and flying omnibuses; of screaming gramophones and standardized “homes”: a city where Electricity was King and man its soulless slave. But a city of peace, of restful spaces, of leisured men and women; a city of fine streets and pleasant houses, where each could live his own life, learning freedom, individuality; a city of noble schools; of workshops that should be worthy of labour, filled with light and air; smoke and filth driven from the land: science, no longer bound to commercialism, having discovered cleaner forces; a city of gay playgrounds where children should learn laughter; of leafy walks where the creatures of the wood and field should be as welcome guests helping to teach sympathy and kindliness: a city of music, of colour, of gladness. Beauty worshipped as religion; ugliness banished as a sin: no ugly slums, no ugly cruelty, no slatternly women and brutalized men, no ugly, sobbing children; no ugly vice flaunting in every highway its insult to humanity: a city clad in beauty as with a living garment where God should walk with man. “They didn’t get on very well together, Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle?” Joan queried, scenting the opportunity of obtaining first-class evidence.