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 fox-hunting squires over the creatures they honour with their attention.
'What is it, my dear?' Mrs. Marston looked over her spectacles, and her eyes were like half moons peering over full moons.
'That there picture! They'm hurting Him so cruel. And Him fast and all.'
'Oh!' said Mrs. Marston wonderingly, 'that's nothing to get vexed about. Why, don't you know that's Jesus Christ dying for us?'
'Not for me!' flashed Hazel.
'My dear!'
'No, what for should He? There shall none die along of me, much less be tormented.'
'Needs be that one man die for the people,' quoted Mrs. Marston easily.
'Only through blood can sin be washed white.'
'Blood makes things raddled, not white; and if so be any's got to die;
I'll die for myself.'
The old gabled houses, dark and solemn with heavy carved oak, the smart plate-glass windows of the modern shops, the square dogmatic church towers and the pointed insinuating spires—all seemed to listen in surprise to this being who was not content to let another suffer for her. For civilization as it now stands is based solely on this one thing—vicarious suffering. From the central doctrine of its chief creed to the system of its trade; from the vivisection-table to the consumptive genius dying so that crowds of fat folk may get his soul in a cheap form, it is all built up on sacrifice of other creatures.